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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Problem with 3D printing is how slow it really is. I do see a path for better printing quality and overtime becoming indistinguishable from injection molding, but I do not see any path for beating a 15 second cycle time. Printing a coffee mug can take whopping 8 hours, depending on specifics of quality and the machine.

I feel like Injection Molding is far more amazing, interesting, intriguing and challenging process than 3D printing and yet, it gets zero media coverage. Before people respond to this - yes, I know the pros/cons of 3D printing and it certainly has place in manufacturing processes. Just pointing out the media hype around 3D printing which I thought would die down after 2015 or so... but it continues to overwhelm news sources.

Edit: Goddamn it HN, why are you all responding to the pros/cons of 3D printing? My complain is about media coverage and how click baity engagement metrics propelled 3D printing into this glorified do-all-world-changing-technology. It disproportionately gets attention, was just using injection-molding as a talking point. There are so many interesting manufacturing techniques. Every MBA exec wants their engineers to explore 3D-printing without knowing its downsides, thanks to the stupid media.

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> Problem with 3D printing is how slow it really is.

Yeh, it's slow. But the article is talking about "The ability to build a one-off product such as a boat or small yacht, directly from CAD".

I dunno about you, but I've designed and paid for injection molds, and there is nothing cheap or fast about producing the first one. We were a small company, those molds cost us a substantial fraction of our capital. I would not describe the feelings engendered by unpacking and checking that first one as magical. Words that spring to mind are hope and dread, and eventually relief when we realised it would not be that expensive to move through holes in PCB's by 0.5mm, and adjust metal jigs, and resignation that the aesthetics of the thing were not quite as we expected, but would do.

Now a technology that allowed us to print something in 24 or 48 hours for a few thousand that was actually useable in the field - that would have looked absolutely magical. Being able to print something size of a boat hull that is strong enough to sail is almost unbelievable, even now.

The more interesting comparison point might be other CNC machining techniques which share the ability to create one off products directly from CAD with raw material, but seem to get a fraction of the attention of 'printing'. Leaving aside them being less suited to some use cases than 'printing' (and much more suited to others), is computer controlled manufacturing using an additive process really that much more magical than computer controlled manufacturing using a subtractive process?

You'd be throwing an awful lot of material away if you tried to machine a boat out of a solid block of plastic.

Subtractive manufacturing can give you a higher-quality result and can use a wider range of materials, but the machinery costs more because it needs to be stronger, and the materials cost more because you throw away everything that doesn't go into the final part.

Surely if you do it at scale the removed material can be recycled fairly cheaply?

Standard practice in CNC machining (at a certain scale) to deliver at least aluminum back to the distributor. Not all materials can be recycled as effectively though, or have a price point where it is worth doing. Plastic has the problem of being incredibly cheap.

Even at home/hobbyist scale, it's worth taking aluminium swarf to a metal recycler.

Is there anyone with a metallurgy background reading this? It's easy to melt aluminium at home, what are the properties of a billet cast with primitive tools vs in a factory? Like, is it more brittle, or does it have cavities etc? What circumstances does a factory control better for to get a better product?

Casting is a massive pain in the ass. It's one of those cases where the difference is in all the sum of all the little things and refinements that only make sense at scale.

For garage level, I built this charcoal aluminum forge with my friend and it works great for the price! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHD10DjxM1g

It's relatively easy to re-cast aluminum at home at small scale. I think the biggest challenge for boat-sized would be the massive amount of energy needed to heat all that metal, plus the huge crucible and machinery to pour it.

Another issue with home-cast aluminum is alumina (oxidized aluminum) which will make small inclusion defects in your print. I've had several casts fail because I wasn't able to properly separate the alumina and the high-alumina areas were very brittle. I think most aluminum foundries have the electrolysis capabilities to convert all the alumina back to aluminum, but this is an extremely high voltage hot process that does not seem feasible for garage-scale.

(As an aside, aluminum cans have a ton of oxide because of the high surface area, so you get a ton of dross that must be skimmed off to use the molten aluminum. We would do it in two steps: first melt cans and pour in a muffin tin to make small ingots, then use those higher-purity ingots to cast the desired piece. Probably better in most circumstances to just start with lower-surface-area aluminum materials: better to pay for quality bar stock or ingots rather than spend the same on more charcoal for multiple runs.)

Note: if anyone tries this, invest in safety! At minimum, you should have welding gloves, sturdy tongs and a face shield. You should understand what happens when molten aluminum comes in contact with moisture (wet concrete is extremely dangerous!), practice your pouring motion with a cold crucible, and keep a bucket of water and/or fire extinguisher nearby in case you start a fire.

But please research casting safety yourself, I'm no expert. 1200+F temperatures significantly more dangerous than the high temperatures we interact with in our daily lives.

Plastic scrap value is near zero [1] when compared to Aluminum

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fZ0f_O...

Plastic of unknown provenance is worth nearly nothing.

Clean pure plastic chips that just got cut off of a block of new plastic can be made back into pellets and used for new stuff and is worth a little less than plastic pellets.

I could see this working at scale, but nobody is going to trust a hobbiest or small shop that they haven't contaminated the bin.

More realistically you would one-off something like a boat out of fiberglass or carbon fiber and a non-metal mold (either shaped wood or foam, both of which can be large-scale milled easily). Yes, it would be more expensive than 3D printing, but a hell of a lot cheaper than an injection mold and with far better material properties than any thermoplastic. Or do it with vacuum forming. Injection molds are expensive because they are specifically designed and made for high-volume production with tight tolerances. If you don't need those things there are much cheaper options.

I'm personally bullish on 3D printing long-term, but FDM mostly still sucks and gets a lot more positive press than actual practical use in industry. It's just the easiest and cheapest of the printing technologies to expand on, so you see a lot of concept projects that sound good on paper.

I think there are different use cases, from an fully automated Lego factory to a fully automated clay-house printer on Mars.

Indeed, I work for a company that manufactures high end technology, and we're in a comfortable position where we don't need the production volume of injection molding, and can use soft-tooling processes. It's a lot less nerve wracking. Also, paint hides a lot of sins. ;-)

The thing to be careful about: Don't assume you know what's cheaper: Injection molding or something else. I've had my own assumptions blown away so many times.

But 3d printing is still kind of at the phase that machine learning went through, where every meeting inspires at least one manager to blurt out: "Have you considered using 3d printing for this design?" with the other managers secretly wishing that they had been so clever.

As with nearly all capabilities in all fields, you're trading off flexibility, quality, throughput and speed to market. You're also trading off cost on the vectors of capex vs. opex.

Injection moulding gives high quality and throughput with low flexibility and relatively high capex. That makes it fit for use for some cases and not for others.

In my home 3d printer for instance, i can download and print a snowflake or some small toy my child wants to hang on the Christmas tree that she is missing in about 20 mins which otherwise would entail a trip to the store or ordering online and waiting. However, if i were to print all the decorations she wants to hang, it would take an inordinate amount of time and I'm better off making the trip to the store.

> Edit: Goddamn it HN, why are you all responding to the pros/cons of 3D printing?

Your complaint about media coverage was a whole sentence. Sentence and a half being generous. The complaint itself looks like a related comment at the end rather than the main point. Most of your post was pros/cons which was not clearly linked to media coverage. It really does look like a post about injection molding vs 3d printing.

> My complain is about media coverage and how click baity engagement metrics propelled 3D printing into this glorified do-all-world-changing-technology.

I do think this is a surprise, injection moulding is a technique as old as dirt (well really plastic). You wanna see crazy coverage for injection moulding go back to the 1910s when the technique was starting to take off.

At the end of the day there just aren’t any big innovations in injection moulding to talk about, it all minor process improvements, may of which are happening behind closed doors, hidden as company secret sauce.

3D printing on the other hand. Is such an comparatively underdeveloped and under-utilised technique that just sneezing next to a 3D printer is a form of news worth innovation.

For media coverage, does injection molding have flashy new use cases etc? My (non-expert) impression is that injection molding is the "boring default" for many use cases, and thus improvement in it won't see much coverage. (+ the specific submission is on a website specializing on 3D printing as a topic). If you show me an industrially made part and say "they injection molded that", the reaction is "sure, as you would", not "Oh? that's interesting, why did they do that?".

Similar to how news will rather report on unusual building materials rather than run stories to remind people that bricks are cool too. (and if a home buyer insists on using something fancy new over bricks or whatever default would be more appropriate, that's their fault)

That's not to say that defaults actually are boring if you deal with them directly, I find people explaining details of things like injection molding fascinating, but "we improved X in a standard industry process" just isn't as easy to make briefly interesting to mass audience and thus gets reported less.

Apple actually gets a decent amount of coverage for their very impressive injection moldings. Most advancements in IM today are not in the ability to make complex parts, but more in the ability to make them pretty.

Apple makes many parts with extremely tight tolerances with almost no visual defects, and within the industry it's understood that it's extremely hard to make your IM parts look like Apple's for that reason.

Yes, even mainstream media covers that every now and then (e.g. "Apple just bought an entire company making X to make even better macbooks/iPhones/..."), but as the parent poster complained 3D printing is getting more attention.

Whereas "within the industry" is exactly the thing I'm talking about: the threshold for getting into more mainstream media is not necessarily related to actual importance and different from what field-specific or even just enthusiast perception focuses on. E.g. the bits and pieces I know about injection molding mostly come from "maker-type" publications that, while of course also talking about 3D printing a lot, also cover entry-level discussions of what happens if you try taking something to larger-scale production - and "forget about your product looking like an Apple product" is high on that list ;)

Yeah I think it's just how news media works I guess. Especially since 3D printing is a cool technology that hasn't quite hit it's stride yet, people are want to see how it's going to change things.

IM has been the same old IM for the past 5 decades more or less.

Maybe this is too off topic, but I've always wondered why injection molding couldn't be done cheaper (albeit slower) by just milling aluminum to be used as molds.

Why is there such a large gap between 3d printing something and setting up an expensive ($50k+) and time consuming (months) injection molding station?

Aluminum is used for injection molds:

https://www.protolabs.com/resources/blog/injection-molding-a...

https://www.moldmakingtechnology.com/articles/lets-be-clear-...

tl;dr: the molds aren't as durable, and can't do certain things as well as steel molds can. But for small volumes and simpler designs that doesn't matter, so they are quite commonly used.

Next logical step is 3d-print those Aluminum molds.

Why? CNC machining provides better quality and is faster. You can CNC a simple mold in minutes with precision that exceeds any 3D printing technology.

One possible reason would be to allow geometry which isn't easily milled. Perhaps cooling jackets, for example, could be incorporated into the mold for example.

Beyond the cooling jackets there isn’t really going to be anything hard to mill. If the geometry is hard to mill, then it’s almost certainly inappropriate for injection moulding (assuming you actually want to extract your injection moulded object from the mould).

Minutes is a stretch. It will likely take multiple tools and setups to make a mold, and even more if you're starting from a billet that needs facing etc.

I agree it is definitely a stretch for a full mold, but was thinking along the lines of an mold pocket insert, like those which can be 3D printed [1].

You could make this from reasonably sized stock with 2 setups. First you rough the shape and cut the mold cavity, then you remove the stock and face the backside. I'm used to an automatic tool changer, which would be needed if you want to go fast

https://www.pressebox.com/pressrelease/apium-additive-techno...

Is there actual 3D printing of metals? Last time I checked there was a very difficult process of 3d printing resin-on-dust, then pre-baking the dust-resin form, then soaking it in molten metal. Also it wasn't aluminium.

Yes there is 3D printing of metals. I’ve seen it predominantly in aerospace parts or rocketry

Did you read the article?? They printed a metal propeller for the boat.

High temperature resins can be 3d-printed and used for molds. These can be used for low-run injection molding or vacuumforming. Formlabs have some content on the topic: https://formlabs.com/blog/braskem-3d-printing-injection-mold...

At one point aluminum tools were a good trade off in time vs quality, but these days they only save maybe 10-20% of the tooling schedule and cost over steel. Tool life and robustness isn’t great so they’re not so popular any more. Usually when someone says “soft tooling” these days, they just mean softer steel which is slightly cheaper and faster to machine, at some trade off in tool life.

There are already 3D printed steel core and cavity inserts for injection molds. They laser sinter powdered metal and then run a very tiny ball end mill around each layer to clean up the surface finish. Traditional CNC and EDM is still how most molds are made, but occasionally it makes sense to 3D print. You can get cooling lines in patterns that are impossible to machine and you can make tools faster sometimes. The costs for the machines are very high, and the size of the parts are limited.

Why? You just 3D print steel ones.

You use the metal sintering printer to deposit the metal. Then you use an in-envelope milling head to polish it.

The cooling can be conformal since the shape isn't limited by milling technology. And, since molds have a lead time of at least 6 weeks (and generally worse because something always goes wrong), speed isn't the issue.

There was a good talk at Molding 2018 by the CEO of a Silicon Valley medical prototyping company about how his folks simply won't deal with conventional molds anymore and he has bought 3 of the 3D metal printers with in-envelope milling heads.

Unfortunately, the Molding conference website is a dumpster fire for useful technical information. If I can remember the name of the company, I'll reply.

There are houses that will do small runs of plastics using cheap molds made out of Aluminum.

https://www.protolabs.com/services/injection-molding/plastic...

Far as I can tell if you're making a few hundred/thousand parts a year that's totally reasonable.

Molds can be really complex tools, with moving parts and coolant ducts. Designing one isn't easy, and machining definitely also isn't.

Probably the material cost isn't the problem.

In addition, injection molding machines are huge and complex. They need to melt the plastic and move it into the mold without clogging up and with a repeatable high pressure.

Here's[1] a video with some discussion around the process of designing a mold for a firearm part, from someone who's trying to bring an injection molded product to the market. Here's[2] a video from the actual molding process.

This is obviously for mass production, so I guess you can cut some corners for low-volume production, but I imagine designing a fairly proper mold is still required.

I'm not into firearms but it was interesting to hear the complexities involved, was a lot of things I hadn't thought about.

[1]: https://youtu.be/QmhYMRNzFu8?t=256

[2]: https://www.bitchute.com/video/EMOOqo9G2pPd/ (loud!)

>injection molding machines are huge and complex

Or they can be small (benchtop), simple and inexpensive ($1000). https://www.minijector.com/

Early in my career I ran one of these machines to mold parts for implantable medical devices. I've also designed tools for them which can be easily machined yourself for a few hundred dollars.

It isn't that expensive for low volume molding. There are commercial vendors that provide molded parts from CAD in less 5 days for about $5,000. The molds are aluminum, so they have limited lifetime, but are great for volumes in the 10s of thousands.

When I want high tolerance parts, or hundreds of parts, I find it is faster and cheaper to go with contract molding despite having 50k of 3D printing equipment in my lab

Thermoforming (aka. vacuum / pressure forming) is the faster way to achieve large format shapes. You begin with the skin which can arrive either pre-cut or in rolls. You then heat it in a large scale oven usually based on ceramic heating modules. Once pliable at a polymer-specific temperature use your aluminium mould to obtain a desired shape in combination with positive and/or negative air pressure. The alumnium's conductivity assists with cooling the part to set the new shape. Then withdraw the mould.

For super high speed boat building, you could use a combination of this and maybe ultrasonic welding to rapidly fuse multiple sheets and build up a higher body. The challenge would be fusing to a superstructure while maintaining integrity.

Currently, this process is only used for dinghy-scale vessels.

I have read an article on using 3d printing in metal for the inner mould (plug) for alpine ski boots. I think this was just an experiment that the manufacturer was doing with some of their top athletes.

I've been really interested for a while now in titanium, and while I think laser sintering is a really cool application, something caught my eye when trying to find videos about the material: some of the titanium-alloy hammers you can buy at the hardware store are made by molten metal casting in ceramic molds. For some reason it really fascinates me to see titanium being used that way, because it's not the way most places use it (it is a notoriously hard metal to work with). I wonder, are laser sintering and other techniques fundamentally slow or can they be improved to be more competitive?

https://youtu.be/p1Vk2hMO0ME?t=83

They are pretty fundamentally slow because of the constraints from the melt pool. Because you are trying to locally melt the material (lots of energy) and then immediately solidify it, you pretty much have to use a melt pool under a certain size and go under a certain speed to avoid making a total mess of the part.

Also a significant amount of energy goes to waste as it gets dissipated by the material, and the powder feedstock is extremely expensive as it needs to be a certain size of round powder which is hard to manufacture.

The revolution will be when we can use 1000's of printheads in parallel. I don't think that's SF, more of an engineering problem. A bit like a 'dot matrix' printer for PLA.

Injection molding is established technology and nothing new, and is much harder to DIY, which is why it gets less media coverage.

The beauty of 3D printing is that you need no molds. You can print all sorts of stuff with the same printer in the same config.

You nailed it. The problem now is that every exec wants their engineers to investigate 3D printing even if it makes zero sense because of all the media hype in last decade.

All these boats getting 3D printed (also those mentioned in the article) are made from composites, primarily carbon fiber or fiberglass based composites.

Injection molding for plastic parts is easy and fast, however the current process it takes to make carbon fiber composites is highly energy intensive (one needs huge ovens), time consuming, expensive, and some approaches can even be highly labor intensive. This is also the reason why only the more expensive cars in the market have carbon fiber bodies as opposed to all cars/vehicles in the market.

An example of the process of carbon fiber construction today from Koenigsegg's cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=504I_hJDFck

I wonder if you had put your paragraphs in the other order, you might have had better luck. I was absolutely about to reply with some discussion on 3D printing, until I noticed the edit keyword and so read that first.

I know it should be on the reader to fully read a comment, but it's the internet, so I adjust my comments sometimes to make sure my point is across before people jump ship.

In some applications the turnaround time either doesn't matter or can be overcome. (i.e. with FDM printing it's pretty trivial to use 2..N print heads to get an increase of 2..N in part production)

Also, this happens with virtually every new technology. See AI, blockchain etc. In every company that a given technology potentially impacts/applies to, at some point there is an Executive asking 'what is our strategy for X?' which results in one or more projects related to X being spun up. Eventually most of these efforts will fizzle/fade but there will be a subset of use cases where there will be a (possibly surprising) benefit that offsets the slow speed / limited resolution / whatever that makes 3D printing worth using in real production environments. There are also some instances where 3D printing (whether FDM, SLA, SLS etc) can produce a better result than existing alternatives like injection molding. It's just another tool in the toolbox.

> In some applications the turnaround time either doesn't matter or can be overcome. (i.e. with FDM printing it's pretty trivial to use 2..N print heads to get an increase of 2..N in part production)

Not if you only need one, which is true for the vast majority of prints.

Give me a $399 Chinese injection molding gear copied from an open source design by a guy in Europe -- I mean, that's how 3D printing culture started, but the FDM printer technology itself did exist and were used, albeit at small scales in professional contexts, just like how industrial injection molding exists right now.

Would by immediately for our makerspace - where we already have CNC machines that we can make alu molds with.

>I feel like Injection Molding is far more amazing, interesting, intriguing and challenging process than 3D printing and yet, it gets zero media coverage.

The cheapest desktop injection molding machine [0] I have seen costs $12500 and it's not very capable. Yeah sure it is intriguing and interesting and challenging just like a $200k CNC machine is interesting but how can you be surprised that there is no community of "home gamers" with these machines? The real injection molding machines are huge, bloody expensive and most of them have been moved to China.

Just look at the size of the final products: https://youtu.be/n7JWPxk92fY?t=857

There are also lots of quality problems because injection molding is a process where you have to mess around with the settings and do multiple production runs before you figure out how to get optimal results. Your 3D printer is slow but reliable in comparison. You have very high confidence that once you tune the printer itself (not the specific injection molding production run) the vast majority of your prints will succeed on first print without you having to do anything. This means you can easily produce one off parts at low cost. It's easy to see why 3D printing is popular. It's cheap and just works both in terms of reliability and the size of the objects you can make.

Meanwhile with injection molding that $12500 machine is barely capable of anything a hobbyist would want and that's without considering that you need to design your own molds and then machine them yourself because if you are going to outsource the mold you might as well outsource everything and who wants to make an article about "hey you can contact these companies to produce injection molded parts"? Everyone already knows that this is something companies do.

[0] https://www.apsx.com/desktop-injection-molding-machine

I think you two are making two compatible points:

1) Injection Molding is far more amazing, interesting, intriguing and challenging

2) There is wider market for home 3D printing than injection molding

It really comes down to what you are trying to do and what you need your parts for. Also, there absolute is a community of home machinists. I have met a couple people with home CNCs, and many more with very capable machine shops.

There are cheap desktop CNC machines around but they probably aren't very good. That said, cheap 3d printed stuff isn't often very high fidelity either. https://www.amazon.com/Upgraded-Control-Engraving-Controller...

I was thinking of real CNC mills. along the lines of this: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=tormach&_saca...

Um why would there need to be 'media coverage' around technologies that everyone knows about and has basically been around forever?

Media coverage dominates new technology [3d printing]... SHOCKER I TELL YOU!

This is an excellent point. 3D printing will likely never replace injection molding for plastic parts above a volume of a few thousand. This is well known in the industry but largely unexamined by the media.

High-strength 3D printing however, of composites / metal, has a much higher market ceiling. Can certainly be cost-competitive with CNC and probably also expendable mold casting in the short-term.

Raw material for 3d printing is ultra cheap specially when you try making your own filament from plastic pellets which sell for dirt cheap:

https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

Problem with 3D printing is how slow it really is.

I think you need to start thinking about manufacturing as more than just the mass production of identical products. 3D printing isn't at all suitable if you want to make 10,000 identical items. That doesn't make it useless.

I didn't say it is useless.

We do get 3D printed parts from time to time at work: They usually need to have brass inserts put in them, which mean milling the printed holes to size too. Since the part is fairly complex, milling the part wouldn't be that much of a time saver. I'd say 5~7 hours print-job on each, depending on the printer, milling it could be done in half that easily, but a qualified operator's time cost a fair bit more than someone keeping an eye on two (or more) printers while doing paperwork.

(As long as they don't need more than the ten pieces we get (at most) at a time at least.)

> Problem with 3D printing is how slow it really is.

I think 3D printing is a really scalable approach. You can have a large 3D printer with tens or maybe much more printing heads, all working in parallel on the same large part or the whole product.

The benefit of 3D printing is flexibility. If you’re going to print at scale to make up for time, you’ve left the realm of flexibility and are now in the world of mass production.

Not necessarily. You could have many printheads side-by-side leaving you still very general in terms of what you can do but much faster.

Nevermind energy consumption, floor space, maintenance, inconsistency in quality, loading-unloading times, postprocessing / cleaning, etc.

3D printing is not really scalable.

Folks that suggest we can just buy 10,000 3D printers to replace 8 injection molding machines haven't really stepped into a high volume factory, much less operate one.

Energy consumption of other manufacturing methods is also quite high, for instance, injection molding is super energy intensive, as are most forms of casting and machining.

It's clear that 3D printing is no substitute for injection molding, stamping or or other such mass fabrication methods. But, like with every other manufacturing method: it is complementary, there are applications for all of these.

And yes, I've stepped into factories, and worked with/for them, beside that I had a metal workshop and was partner in an early CAD/CAM company. So FWIW I think I understand the limitations of the tech quite well, and I think that if 3D printing could be sped up by a factor of 100 or so (which is definitely in the realm of the possible) that the other disadvantages would matter a lot less than they do today.

It’s not about what you /could/ do, it’s that for 1-offs 3D has an advantage but for 1000+ off injection moulding is just fundamentally better.

Now, 3D printing metal moulds and using them for injection moulding could be interesting...

Injection molding can't work with many geometries; for example, complex enough boat has a lot of places where the material has to go along a non-convex paths. 3D printers can print anything, say DMLS, including closed volumes (how to remove material from those volumes is another question). Having many heads the process can be sped up - but with DMLS it's mostly moving mirrors which needs to be parallelized, as laser beams have little inertia.

Comparing with injection molding it seems IM is a good shortcut for many - not all - cases, while 3D printing is a fundamentally generic technology.

> Edit: Goddamn it HN, why are you all responding to the pros/cons of 3D printing? My complain is about media coverage

Because the appropriateness of rosy media coverage is dependent on the actual potential of 3D printing.

It wouldn't have to be slow.

Print on the inside of a spinning drum. That way, you don't have to reverse direction. Print from a whole row of nozzles or lasers or whatever. That way, yet another dimension doesn't require reversing movement. That leaves just one axis if laying something down like an inkjet printer. If curing with a laser, the final axis can be handled by the laser simply crossing the needed distance.

The real money is selling large format 3D printers. For what they are they sure cost a premium.

I think you make an excellent meta point. I would love to know why this happens. Why are some technology super hyped and others aren't? Maybe it is a stochastic process and somehow one term gets amplified and gets the attention of the MBAs and consultants. Dunno. Love to hear some theories

I don't think it's just a random process. The coolest-sounding technologies are the ones where you can describe to a layman how it works, but they've still rarely or never seen something that works that way.

3d-printing is perfect tech for this: the principle is graspable by anyone, it makes for cool stop motion videos, yet it's still rare in practice. Injection moulding is too commonplace: we've cast metal in moulds for thousands of years.

A cool name helps as well, of course. 3D printing is definitely sexier than "additive manufacturing".

In this case I think it’s obvious if you know the pros and cons of 3D printing. 3D printing has a major pro: It may be slow to make 1 thing, but I can make anything I want change it quickly.

I got a 3D printer a couple years ago. It’s pretty amazing. I can recreate broken parts, design improvements to existing things and prototype them without any help. These days with so much emphasis on reducing our environmental footprint, why would be interested in mass production?

3d printing is hyped because you can get a 3D printer at home and have fun prototyping.

Injection molding is a industrial process and isn't really accessible to people.

It's usually a function of how much time/energy/money companies in a space put into generating the hype. There are teams of people at the better funded companies working to arrange interviews, plant stories, have influencers promote things and so on... all in an attempt to build awareness and eventually help them increase sales. It's basically an early stage marketing strategy until it's known how big the market is and how big a piece of it a given company is able to get and then more traditional marketing approaches take over. Worst case: the company runs out of money which will also turn off the hype machine.

This kinda misses the point of the core. 3D printing transfers power inward vs outward. When this happens innovation explodes as the average individual has much more ability to produce on their own. Localized manufacturing is a subtle huge boom similar to computation.

Isn't it getting exponentially cheaper and faster? That's newsworthy.

thanks for the comment. what are some other manufacturing techniques you think warrant more attention and research?

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