How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing | Hacker News Reader

How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

3dprinter.net

20 pointspittsburgh32 comments

> and there is no nation on earth with the inventiveness found on such a massive scale as in America.

Citation needed? This sentence and the next just made me stop reading. It's borderline supremacism. Whether the rest of the article has valid points or not such a sweeping statement can not be taken seriously.

So is this statement : "Creative and industrious Americans will no longer be challenged by the low-cost assembly line workers of Southeast Asia and third world countries."

It almost feels like political speech.

Whatever it feels like, the fact remains that the economy is being crippled by cheap plastic crap made on the other side of the planet and shipped - with much cost - to consumers who only play with it for 0.0000001% of the time that most of these things will be sitting there, forever, out in some landfill somewhere.

I say, bring on the 3D printing revolution. First order for my 3D printer: make me a 3D component shredder that spits out more reusable pellets for my printer!

Since the 1950's, the US has won over half the Nobel Prizes awarded in physics, chemistry and medicine. The car, airplane, internet, laser, sequencing of the human genome, manned lunar landings and a host of humanity's other technological triumphs each came from America. So did the modern PC, the web, and most likely the search engines and social networking sites you use.

I sense some bruised ego and a dash of nationalism, but if that line keeps you from reading the article because you want citations, then I have a couple of suggestions for where you can find them: Google and Wikipedia.

I'm sympathetic to the thrust of your argument, but you might like to rethink the airplane, the car, and the Web.

I might not. Much as the hamburger isn't technically an American invention, the hamburger as we know it is. For all practical purposes it is from America, not Hamburg.

Cars- It's true that a Frenchman made the first gas engine car, and that some of the very, very early cars (which were unaffordable and unusable by the masses) came out of central Europe. Nonetheless, it was US innovations that led to cars that were actually adopted by significant numbers.

Airplane- I really don't know what you're getting at here. From the Wright brothers' first flight to the mass adoption decades later, the US lead the way.

Web- The web as we know it started with Mosaic, which came out of Illinois. Even by 1995, the vast majority of internet users and sites were in the US. If one were to be pedantic, Lynx which came out of Kansas could be considered to be the start. I can only assume you're pointing at Tim Berners-Lee, who made the initial proposal for the protocol and a few proof of concept tools. He's an Englishman, but has chosen to do his work in the US out of MIT, which only goes to show the strength of the OP's argument.

I still stand by my remark that being seriously upset by that line in the article is an indicator of being out of touch with reality.

> it was US innovations that led to cars

Yes, Ford invented the production line, he did not invent cars.

> From the Wright brothers' first flight

Flight had been going on for decades. There is some evidence that a New Zealander did controlled flight under power first (which is what the Wright brothers are generally credited with), but did not publicise it. Wing-warping was already under trial in Europe at the same time as the Wright brothers; the Wright brothers' innovation was to get to the patent office first. (I don't share people's kudos of the Wright brothers. They got too much credit for what was going to happen anyway within weeks in Europe. They were extremely aggressive patentors and did much to suppress innovation by competitors.)

> Web

Berners-Lee invented the Web. Pure and simple. Other people made tools that used it, but that was not the claim.

Breathless speculation penned by yet another 3D printing evangelist with less consideration of material science than your average ant. Wake me up when you know what Young's Modulus is.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - former IBM president Thomas J. Watson

(it's a misquote, incidentally, but you get the point)

I am not the author of the article, just the submitter. However, I'll run with your comment anyway...

Tensile Modulus (aka Young's Modulus) is a measure of how stiff a material is. Specifically, it's a measure of how much a material stretches under load. (Diamond has a very high tensile modulus while rubber has a very low tensile modulus.)

Ten years ago, people were 3D printing in plastics with a tensile modulus of under 1,000 MPa and they were happy with that. Today you can print in DSM Somos NanoTool which has a tensile modulus of 11,400 MPa. Keep in mind this is a plastic. ( Source: http://www.dsm.com/en_US/downloads/dsms/NanoTooleng_10.09.pd... )

If you need even stronger materials then you should consider using an SLS (selective laser sintering) printer that can build products in titanium, aluminum or steel. Imagine how many ants could safely walk across a bridge 3D printed in any of these!

I guess I'm not convinced. Can someone explain the utility of 3D printing beyond rapidly building prototypes? Can it really reach scale and quality to do mass manufacturing? And what types of products could not in any way be manufactured with 3D printers? Which could?

Take those little 3d printers and then make it the side of a 4 story house. Now make it print using sand/glass/metal all in one pass. Now increase the resolution up to 5000dpi or so.

There is some research going on the UK (I can't remember the University now) to do with printing buildings. The potential for reducing raw material and labour costs must be huge.

I believe you're thinking of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfbhdZKPHro

3D printing isn't feasible for the the mass manufacturing of everything yet, but it's feasible for certain types of products today, and it is improving. Here are some ways in which 3D printing has moved closer in the last few years:

* Stronger materials, such as Somos NeXt resin: http://www.dsm.com/en_US/html/dsms/next.htm

* Cheaper materials

* BioCompatible materials, such as Med610 which just came out last week: http://www.objet.com/3D-Printing-Materials/Overview/Bio-Comp...

* The ability to print in more than one material at a time, as shown in these human feet: http://www.objetblog.com/2011/09/21/a-table-of-3d-printed-fe...

* Higher resolution printing, such as the Objet Eden500V which can print detail as small as 0.0006”: http://www.objet.com/3D-Printer/Objet_Eden500V/

Examples of consumer products currently being made with the help of 3D printers include:

* Invisalign braces: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVQq9joOS_4

* Hearing aids: http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/3d-printing-in-medicine-...

* Jewelry: http://www.summerized.com/jewelry/

Things will really take off for 3D printing when printers can simultaneously print in multiple materials like plastic, metal, and rubber, and in multiple colors per part. Until then, you're right that 3D printers will continue to be used primarily for rapid prototyping, but this will change within a few years as the technology continues to improve and the cost continues to fall.

You forgot http://thingiverse.com/ .. spend an hour browsing that site and you'll see exactly why 3D printing is a concept whose time has definitely come.

The big question: how long will it take for this form of manufacturing to achieve the cost effectiveness of current methods? The bottom line for everyone, including consumers, is cost. Don't forget about quality control.

Let's also not assume that we will always be the most innovative. We have to make sure that the current and next generation of students get the quality education they need in math and science to keep us dominant in Tech. Interesting article but lots of assumptions and unanswered questions.

Forget AutoCAD, use Tinkercad (http://www.tinkercad.com/) which lets you do solid modelling in your browser using WebGL.

(I have no association w/ Tinkercad; just think it's very cool technology w/ WebGL in the front end and Go in the back end.)

Forget Tinkercad; use OpenSCAD! (http://www.openscad.org/)

Its the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller! :)

(Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of the OpenSCAD team, and daily watch their efforts to subvert 3D printing - i.e. make it available to all and sundry for a good price using Open Source methods .. http://thingiverse.com/ ftw!)

First cab off the rank is affordable laser cutting. I've got several projects i'd love to do once that becomes feasible. Then CNC mills, and 3d printing... the future is bright!

This could put IKEA out of business.

I wonder how long it'll be until companies start suing.

The cost, per unit, of printing a chair will be orders of magnitude higher than the cost of making millions of the same chair in huge factories specifically tooled for the job. IKEA has nothing to worry about.

What you cite is the manufacturing cost. Then you have distribution and retail cost. The huge factories and stores need capital, so financing cost as well.

Even ignoring all that, it cost me more to build my own bookshelf from lumber and materials at Home Depot than it would have cost to buy a nice, pre-made bookshelf from Ikea. Presumably Ikea has factored their costs into the resulting price.

I'm not sure that home depot sells the laminated? particle board used in ikea furniture. If you used unlaminated particle board, you'd certainly come out a lot cheaper at home depot. heck, most ikea desks could be made out of one 4x8 sheet, so even if you used slightly higher quality plywood, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of materials cost.

Yup, for less than USD$8 you get a 4x8 sheet of OSB[1]; I'd bet money that stuff is stronger than the stuff ikea makes desks out of. Now, I dono how much it takes to laminate that stuff nicely like ikea does, but the raw materials for cheap 'engineered wood products' are incredibly inexpensive. Heck, for $2 you can get an 8' long 2x4 that is actual wood. buy two of those and you can build something much stronger than the standard ikea desk.

Now, I'm sure it costs ikea less to build the desk than it would cost you to buy the materials, but just like amazon isn't going to sell you compute nodes for less than the cost of buying and co-locating servers even though it costs them less, ikea isn't going to sell to you at those prices.

[1]http://www.homedepot.com/Lumber-Composites-Plywood-Sheathing...

The cheapest desktop at Ikea costs $6[1], and that's pre-laminated and everything. I've bought stuff at Ikea before to cut up and use in other products because it was cheaper than going out and buying the raw materials.

[1](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50071170/)

Ah. I was thinking you wanted to make a desk, not just the top, which you could do with the 4x8 sheet, some screws, and maybe a two by four. (Am I imagining things? or did you edit your original post to say bookshelf rather than desk? it's okay, I edit my posts too; you could also make a bookshelf out of that 4x8 sheet, if your time was free and you had the carpentry skills.)

Even so, the 3' x 2' bit of 'wood product' from ikea costs almost as much as a 4'x8' piece of 'wood product' from home depot. That's more than 5 ikea tables worth of wood.

I think the dramatically increased price (percentage wise, of course, not dollar wise) of the ikea part is in the addition of the laminate on top and on the sides; you can't really cut the laminated particle board to size once you get it, unless you want exposed sawdust-wood, so we are back to manu

I mean, I'm not saying the ikea stuff isn't good; I'm just saying that they, generally speaking, are charging considerably more (as a percentage, not in terms of dollars, and for a $7 item, even if their markup is 4x, well, you probably aren't going to notice.) than what materials cost.

I was the one who said bookshelf (no edits were made). I made it out of planks of wood and wood screws. The Ikea bookshelf uses wood planks but of a lighter/less durable kind of wood. I'm sure mine might have held up cast iron books where the Ikea version would have failed, but as a regular bookshelf for paper books, the price/performance of the Ikea product would have met my needs more than adequately at a decent cost savings.

Companies like IKEA will probably switch to using 3D printing too, if it becomes that much better.

When will a 3D printer print itself?

I believe you are looking for this: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

Sorry no, the reason for the decline of American Manufacturing is due to the miss-use of horizontal integration as opposed to vertical integration within in manufacturing..I cite SpaceX as an example of vertical manufacturing/engineering..

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