3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90% | Hacker News Reader

3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%

economist.com

123 pointsjoshrule69 comments

Good to see the Economist covering 3D printing - it's still amazing to me how much most people, even close to manufacturing, aren't familiar with it at all.

FWIW though - the 90% they're referring to is the delta between machining solid parts and printing them. It should be added that this is a rare use-case for 3D printing.

Usually it competes more directly with injection molding technologies that often have better material usage because there is no need for support material - which goes to waste holding up the hollow areas for the types of material-saving lattice structures they're talking about.

Sometimes you can get great savings, but 3D printing isn't a production materials panacea. Let's not even get into how to recycle composite materials (very energy intensive) and photopolymers (you can't).

As far as recycling goes, it's very exciting that you can recycle plastic bottles into plastic granules/filament and use them for printing.

I think we are not that far away from a self contained fabricator that turns garbage into everyday plastic parts you need.

It's probably going to take a little more than that, but I've always held that landfills are probably going to be very valuable property in 50 years or so. I assume there are going to be "dis-assemblers" to consume and separate "junk" for repurposing in manufacturing.

It's a little dream I have. :-)

Your vision is like a scene out of Wall-E!

Well, that's not entirely true. The lattice structures are internal to the object, and substitute for solid infill. Commercial FDM 3d printers use a crosshatch instead of solid fill, and the reprap toolchain has that as well as a number of cool ones like hexagonal infill. So you have lattices instead of solid walls in the microstructure. With powder printers, such as the metal printers described in the article, you can form hollow areas of any shape since the raw material itself acts as support. To get the material out they need to be open on one side, but that is hardly an issue with a design that airy. No additional material is needed. The only case where you need support is for FDM based printing with sharp overhangs. Even this can be mitigated with clever design, such as making overhanging parts with bridges (connecting walls with a stretched layer of material that spans a gap) or teardrops (closing gaps using low overhang structures, like the buttresses on gothic buildings). The main advantage of 3d printing is that it can produce structures internal to the object that cannot be made by any subtractive method, and that it makes production costs linear and design-independent. This is very cool, since it literally costs the same to make two identical or two different objects (with the same build time) and it separates cost from volume. The costs per unit are still high compared to injection or casting, but the tooling costs are essentially zero. And the costs per unit are dropping rapidly, particularly given that the FDM printers themselves are now partially self-replicating

It's a very exciting time to be living in. I have three printers. The first printed the second. The second printed the third. I've made a number of things which turned from idea to design to prototype within hours to days. Then I tweak, hit print again and I've got production. No tooling, no waiting.

How much work did it take to create a printer when you already had one, and how many custom parts?

About 20 hours of print time, 4-5 hours of assembly time, and around 400EUR of nonprinted parts (motors, electronics, fasteners, hotend parts)

Oh, very nice! That's quite handy.

Did you design your printers or buy them? You should write this up and submit to HN.

It sounds like he probably has 3 RepRaps.

Kliment is active in the #reprap channel on FreeNode, so it's safe to say that he built his own printers.

Bought the first from makerbot, was a huge pain and disappointment, but it got me as far as printing the parts for the second one, a Reprap Mendel. That one in turn printed me (and a number of other people) the more streamlined Prusa Mendel. I'm a contributor to the Prusa variant (I wrote the build documentation and the makefiles, and contributed to some of the parts), but did not design it. So yes, as others said below, I have two repraps (and one non-reprap), and I did build them myself.

Thanks. I was thinking about getting a Makerbot. I'll look into these others.

Strongly advise against the Makerbot products. They cause the highest amount of headaches and are riding on mindshare and marketing rather than quality. Have a look at http://repraplogphase.blogspot.com/2011/01/death-of-sub-1000... for how it came to be this way.

Actually, FDM, Objet, ProJet, SLA, EnvisionTec, SolidScape, an many more use support material that is consumed during the build / post-processing.

Many lattice structures can still be made using injection molding equipment (far cheaper) or starting with a raw material with such a structure: think of aluminum honeycomb.

I agree 3DP is exciting, but we need to get real about what we're trying to achieve - traditional manufacturing engineers are pretty clever too. Not every STL should be run through a nozzle...

FDM is actually one of the worst methods for 3DP manufacturing because it scales linearly - MakerBot et al use this tech because it's the easiest process to build and makes durable parts from common raw materials.

Indeed, but with clever design you can avoid support material during builds and still get adequate results.

I fully agree that you can get lattice structures in a number of processes, but printing is the only reasonable way to get internal, closed lattice structures. And I believe the article was meant to create awareness of a reasonably unknown process, rather than claim that everything else should step aside. Milling, routing, turning and molding aren't going anywhere. But that doesn't make printing any less impressive in the areas it's good at.

FDM scales linearly, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It means you have no cost savings when you make large quantities of the same object, but it also means you have no additional cost to make a different object every time. That's what I think is most exciting about it.

Yea, I only mention these things because there are so many "OMG 3DP is good at everything!" fanboys out there. The open source FDM machines are very exciting. I still wonder what will happen to Stratasys when MakerBot et al get soluble support and finer nozzle size. Should be interesting.

Well I'm not sure you could say the same for this example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHgszH0aqI (printing a working flute, multiple plastics at the same time).

I was a bit curious about the 90% figure, but a good deal depends on what point in the adoption process we're talking about, e.g.

Use 3D printing instead of milling or whatever for prototype.

Use 3D printing instead of whatever for mass production.

Use 3D printing at point of use.

Simple example: I bought a porcelain teapot a few weeks ago. A few days later we broke the lid. So I bought a new teapot. (The old teapot with the broken lid is sitting on a window sill above the kitchen sink, waiting for glue. A tube of glue costs a substantial fraction of the price of the teapot.)

3D printing could eventually lead to a tectonic shift away from planned obsolescence and disposable culture (which, let's face it, is purely an artifact of mass production).

Yea, I'm very much with you. Our goal (at my startup CloudFab) is that by making things for ourselves - or at least closer to what we want - that it'll mean less marketing driven consumer culture and people will want to keep their self-designed goods.

FYI - we can print in ceramics now - so that lid is replaceable if you've got a file ;-)

This claim seem about as believeable as the claim that computers would create the paperless society.

The biggest thing that people forget when dreaming about 3D printers is that it doesn't making something from nothing: the materials have to come from somewhere.

Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard) and we make them small and reliable enough that it's acceptable for normal people (hard) you _still_ have to have a big vat of plastic or whatever lying around, and feed it into the machine.

We've got a long way to go before 'a printer in every home' is reality, if it ever does.

My thoughts: it's like water. A big pipe of raw materials. Just imagine how long that'd take...

Reminds me of The Diamond Age aproximate quote "The windows where made of diamond, because as a simple carbon structure it was cheaper than glass".

I think we are moving away from ownership and towards a more utility/service-oriented society, so I don't think a 3D printer in every home will ever become a reality.

That's what IBM once thought about computers too.

I don't think this is comparable. There is a large difference in dynamics between the utilization of a computer and that of a 3D printer. I would argue that IBM was largely right -- the vast majority of consumers do not use their computer in the way in which IBM intentioned to speak, as a calculator or database. Most of this work is performed as a utility and consumed over the Internet. The modern home computer provides something in functionality more resembling the telephone than a calculator.

The ONLY purpose of a 3D printer is to produce durable goods. Will there ever be a point at which an average consumer will need such a steady stream of durable goods that a dedicated 3D printer will become a necessity?

I don't need even need a home printer or copier really. The few times a year I actually need one, I can walk around the corner to a Kinko's or use the one at work. This also doesn't compare because a printed document is essentially a custom product designed by myself. And despite the prevalence of home printers, it's still vastly cheaper to print documents using mass production techniques. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see this changing, as durable goods are designed by domain experts and the mechanics behind economies of scale would apply even in the 3D printing realm.

Continued product convergence and ultimately nano-tech will further obsolete the necessity to have the large number of specialized, one-off durable goods required for the average household.

The ONLY purpose of a 3D printer is to produce durable goods.

Who says durable? The perfect printer is far away, but once you have one, you can get rid of a dishwasher and washing machine; you would just feed your printer the dirty stuff, and print whatever you need at the moment.

Even better, you could feed your furniture to your printer to make a different set of furniture for a party, or turn your car into a convertible for a week.

We will have to solve the energy problem, first, though.

We will have to solve the energy problem, first, though.

First catch your hare indeed....

The energy implications of shredding and remanufacturing essentially the same items rather than cleaning them just makes me shudder. That really can't be efficient by any definition.

I'm don't think we really know yet what the energy requirements for these processes are.

Ever had something plastic melted (and burned) by the dishwasher? Why not just melt all of it and avoid dumping all the energy in that steaming water down the drain?

Well, you're dumping waste heat either way, and at too low a difference to ambient to be efficient to extract, but while I'm not an expert in the energy usage of 3D printers, I find it very hard to believe that reducing an item to granules and then recreating it from the same granules can be particularly energy efficient from the perspective of information theory.

The other side which I should have considered before is that if the purpose of this is cleaning (as was originally suggested), reducing the item to parts to reassemble without first cleaning it will result in contaminated build components and a lower quality physical product, but with the contamination spread liberally through the item rather than being on the surface where it can be more easily cleaned away.

This is probably far enough away that we can get a little handwavey about little details like contamination.

What if instead of a water heater you had a plastic heater in your house? What if it had some section where the temp was high enough to kill organisms or used other means?

Still it seems like I'd want to give them a quick rinse-off first.

Perhaps everyone's eating utensils will end up some shade of brown. :-P People would likely want some very dark pigments added. Or "junior! we told you not to put Froot Loops in the dishmelter again..."

Or maybe the stuff just gets hauled off for recycling where it can be re-purified efficiently in large scale processes.

the vast majority of consumers do not use their computer in the way in which IBM intentioned to speak, as a calculator or database

The lesson being that this technology, like computers, holds nearly unlimited potential and yet it's still too early for us to predict quite how its going to be used.

If you ask someone thoroughly steeped in the status quo what it's good for, he's very likely to think of it as an extension of current economic properties. (faster, cheaper, sooner, more custom, etc.) He might even realize its potential to be "disruptive". That's where the Economist article is.

Once you start publicly speculating where the post-disruptive state might settle, then you become a science fiction author.

Will there ever be a point at which an average consumer will need such a steady stream of durable goods that a dedicated 3D printer will become a necessity?

Hang out outside a busy WalMart or Target some Saturday afternoon. There's your steady stream.

Perhaps there will be a 'Kinkos' for all your 3D printing needs on every street corner sometime in the future. Head down there with your broken dinner plate or your foot measurements to have a custom item printed off as a replacement plate or custom shoe.

FedEx/Kinko's would be shortsighted if it were not, in fact, FedEx/Kinko's doing it.

Why do you say this? I haven't seen anything that leads to believe that it's the case.

These guys are working on it: http://reprap.org

An open source 3d printer design with the goal being to use it to print all the parts for then next printer.

It may be the problem is that we end up with too many of these things self-replicating all over the place like rabbits!

Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard)

People won't be designing things themselves, they'll be downloading files and then pressing 'print' on their computer. It's like how people share funny pictures, links get sent around and viewed.

Some of us are already doing that. Check thingiverse.com for example.

Perhaps not a paperless society, but computers & the Internet HAVE dramatically decreased the amount of paper we use these days. Just off the top of my head for consumers: Phone books & directories, maps, banking & billing, written correspondence, fax machines, shared scheduling & calendars, media distribution (books, music, movies).

Within the terms that were then understood, they're very well on the way to that though.

The first office I ever worked in, as a summer job as a student, was computerised but used them as glorified typewriters in the main. All the master documents were on paper, punched and organised into lever arch files. Backups? What's a backup? Think back to an old office; row upon row upon row of filing cabinets, carefully indexed. I don't think I've seen that in at least 6-7 years, maybe 10.

I can't remember the last time I found a document where the master copy was on paper. Regularly referred to paper copies are almost exclusively annotated working versions which get destroyed at the end of the process. We circulate documents on paper in some contexts but are equally likely to email them to each other, and that's rising - more often than not, paper is a reference copy for a meeting rather than our master copy.

My employer stopped doing printed payslips and went fully electronic over a year ago. I have paperless billing from two utility companies and could set it up with a third, I just haven't got round to it. I rarely print photos any more. I read eBooks probably slightly more than paper books and definitely read online news rather than newspapers, while magazines are tentatively stepping towards full electronic distribution through both websites and tablet apps. I basically don't send or receive letters any more.

Paper won't go completely any more than cars resulted in the extinction of the domesticated horse, but it seems to me it's heading for much the same specialist/luxury niche in the market.

>Mr Schmitt says it should be possible for a robot builder to specify what a servo needs to do, rather than how it needs to be made, and send that information to a 3D printer, and for the machine’s software to know how to produce it at a low cost.

This is where I will shamelessly plug my startup, DesignByRobots. The overview of the technology is here: http://designbyrobots.com/2011/01/17/first-post/

sorry, server went down. google cache here: http://bit.ly/gPjVr9

For me, the point of interest comes from locking down a blueprint distribution model. Everyone can print certain items depending on their access to raw materials/power/specification of fab, but depending on how much they pay for the 'blueprints' will be the difference between generic and premium branding with every tiny difference in between.

Why would someone pay more for "premium branding" on something they print on their own machine?

Granted I don't understand why people pay more for branded clothes either.

The point of premium branding is in fact to prove that you can afford to pay more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

The cheapest professional machines run into $50K unit prices. A RepRap will set you back under $1K, but it's not very useful at the moment.

Why not? What are the differences?

Generally, those from the engineering community sneer at the MakerBot and the RepRap. Just listen for the word "tolerances."

Now, they're totally right: the home printers have a significantly lower resolution than the professional ones. But unless you're making professional grade parts, you probably don't care, and they use the same materials. (I'm assuming you're making the comparison to other FDM machines.)

Assuming the tolerances for the cheap 3D printers will improve, isn't this a classic case of disruption we are seeing here?

Sure they aren't great enough for everything yet, but there has to be things you can create even with the cheap bots that are good enough to be useful.

Oh yeah, totally, on both counts.

Ah, that makes sense. However, it sounds very good for the price.

Oh totally. It's like the state of the art in the 80s, or something. And they're rapidly improving.

I'm excited to see what happens as the patents in this space expire. I'm expecting it to be similar to what happened with steam engines.

I expect it to be similar to what happened with the printing press and computers in that you'll be able to download (/pirate) actual objects. The revolution will be huge.

You wouldn't download a car, would you?

I'd definitely download a policeman's helmet.

Too late - someone did: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/first-3d-printed-car...

I'm looking forward to my open source kitchen utensils!

No need to look forward: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1111

The best machine gun in Mass Effect 2 has "Fabrication Rights Management" technology which prevents you from printing one for each member of your team. I doubt real-world engineers for companies whose products would be most affected by downloadability are too far behind.

Whoa - that's an interesting take on DRM! Nowadays an industrial CT scanning usually gets past that - not sure what Mass Effect claims to use ;-)

This isn't true, by the way. The uPrints start at $14,900 now: http://www.dimensionprinting.com/3d-printers/3d-printing-upr...

I'm also assuming that you're talking about FDM, like the MakerBot/RepRap. If you're talking about a different process, well, then it's different.

Thanks, prices appear to be falling steadily.

Yep. It's pretty crazy: part prices are actually almost tracking Moore's Law.

There are also newer processes that are much more expensive. If you're checking out something like an Objet machine, or something like EBM, you're still going to be looking at an upper 5 figures to a mid 6.

They come a lot cheaper than that. The biggest cost is the proprietary materials they use, I'm guessing it would easily add up to more than the cost of the printer over time. Servicing costs should also be pretty high.

I've compiled a list of most cheap printers (slightly out of date, I am going to add more soon): http://punkmanufacturing.com/wiki/

As far as usefulness, the open-source printers are not that different from the cheap commercial machines. A well-tuned RepRap should have comparable accuracy. The printing materials are a lot cheaper, as well as the parts (which you can print) and servicing costs. The commercial printers have better resolution, better materials and better software, at least at the moment, but I think that's going to change.

Most of those materials are reverse engineer-able, though. This has a significant impact on the big manufacturer's bottom lines... they derive most of their profit from materials, just like regular printers.

I'll just leave this here: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/

Specifically: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/2009/10/plaster-based-powde...

See how cheap that is? Crazy...

You can probably get a spec-sheet for their proprietary materials if you ask. You might have to reverse-engineer cartridges with security features though.

The Fab@Home guys are trying out various different materials, since their syringe-based extruder allows more flexibility than the RepRap.

http://fabathome.org/wiki/index.php/Fab%40Home:Materials

As far as cheap materials go, it doesn't get much cheaper than garbage plastic.

http://reprap.org/wiki/Recycler

> You can probably get a spec-sheet for their proprietary materials if you ask.

Or you could just go here (this is my old startup): http://marketplace.cloudfab.com/fab_facts (click through for every datasheet on every machine and material)

The biggest cost is probably the manual labor that goes into finishing a part. 3D printers are hardly analogous to the current state of paper printers: all of the technologies require some form of post processing (cutting away supports, curing materials, sanding, etc.).

Most of the discussion I see about 3D printers ignores the significant amount of physical effort you have to put into a part if it will be used for anything (and depending on the method, just to see the part).

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