How a new manufacturing technology will change the world | Hacker News Reader

How a new manufacturing technology will change the world

economist.com

56 pointscharbonnelb26 comments

I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on.

I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communication and design. But ultimately they won't change our manufacturing process - the materials are too weak for our needs. So we make prototypes out of plastic and then the actual manufacturing run will be metal.

That really points out the problem with these columns that suggest 3D Printers are about to drastically change manufacturing. These 3D printers are only really a manufacturing revolution to people pumping out plastic (or weak powdered metal) products in low volumes (<1,000 units) and sizes between a few mm and meter or two cube. That actually doesn't cover a whole lot of products - the unit numbers are the thing that rules out most things you would think of.

3D Printers are great in the design phase - but a contractor like Shapeways will ultimately benefit the most from that.

Actual manufacturing of products was disrupted far more by CNC control. Truthfully a 3D Printer for all it's fancy tech is just an extension of CNC machining into building up from scratch instead of cutting down from stock.

CNC changed everything. You can CNC machine shapes that would have just been impossible before, on a size scale that no 3D printer today can match. You can use any material, and you replace REALLY SKILLED labor (a machinist) with a machine. That was dramatic. The 3D printer is just small potatoes compared to the change that has already happened over the last 30 years.

Completely agree. I was involved with a startup in the 3D printing space, and the gap between what 3D printing is capable of and what people think it will be able to do is just enormous.

I think the more interesting stuff is voxel printing and some of the advanced machining technology that's being developed.

I agree that the future is bright for the technology. I absolutely love the idea of powdered metal 3D printed molds for injection molding. If you can drop down the cost of making a mold by an order of magnitude inject molding of smaller lot sizes becomes economical. I think that really shakes up the consumer product industry because suddenly you can make a new product for 1/10th of the cost as before.

What is voxel printing?

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/Rapid_Assembler

Think Minecraft on a nano scale.

Great points. The company I work with operates production thermoforming machines to produce plastic containers. Each machine produces over 12,000 units every single hour, 24 hours a day -- that's over 2 million every week, with only one or two labor hours per machine-hour. And our machines are not even that big or modern; if we were to replace them with new machines, we could easily scale to three times that much per machine-hour. Technologies such as this help us design a prototype to validate a product for a customer before building molds, but it would never be an actual production process. Not until it can produce three products per second while matching the low weights per part.

Our tool room already is much smaller than it was twenty years ago, while producing more molds, thanks to the wonders of CNC machines.

> I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on.

There's another problem - the authors of such articles don't understand "real manufacturing". Even when they do work with a 3D printer, they don't understand the gap between what it does and what's "real manufacturing" requires.

I agree that as of today 3D printers can't replace almost any commercial manufacturing technique. I think the article was meant for excitement about what may be coming soon. Most of the comments here sound a lot like what photographers said about digital cameras in the early 90's - low quality, poor resolution, expensive. Do you see 3d printing being able to improve in the near future to the point of being useful to you in final production? Or do you think that even with major improvements they just won't be able to keep up with more conventional means?

For what I do today, nothing on the horizon as of today could replace the bulk of our work. I work on industrial stuff where almost everything is metal. We do almost exclusively low volume work so the rapid prototyping is key to our design process, but very little of what we do can be done in plastics of any kind. And I think that extends to a lot of industries.

Certainly if you are designing a new phone and you want to 'feel' a bunch of cases, 3D printing is a dream come true.

But think of all the things it doesn't touch at all. -All chemical processes, from oil refineries to pharmaceuticals -Web processes like making paper and fabric (and even solar panels these days) -Everything related to ICs and circuit boards -Anything made of metal which extends from giant cranes and ships all the way down to bent sheet metal computer cases -Anything that is high volume -Biomedical devices and medical supplies

I think it gets a lot of press because the largest impact will be on the most visible type of product - the mass produced consumer plastic product. Today these all have to be identical copies because the fixed costs are so high (molds) and the per unit costs are so low (plastic). In the future maybe we will see more variety there, but I think fundamentally people don't like choice in products in practice as much as they do in principle (thats just my opinion, but look at what has happened with the consolidation of Linux distros over time). But I think the majority of manufacturing is not doing that stuff.

I think the editor is sympathetic to your position. The subtitle "Print me a stratovarius!" is pretty tongue-in-cheek towards high quality 3D printer manufacturing.

I must respectfully disagree.

I take your central argument to be: "3D printers won't ultimately change our manufacturing process."

I take your main points to be: 1. The materials are weak and thus unsuitable for most products and 2. The efficiencies of scale of traditional manufacturing trump 3D printers in runs above 1k units.

Today your first point is true, however I use 3D printed parts as structural components in my robots and they are sound. I suspect in general material strength will increase until it meets the demands of how people want to use it. I hope you wouldn't make the argument that it can't increase in strength. There will always be material properties that can't be replicated in a fabber, but I do not know how many products in my life need these advanced properties.

Your second point ignores the decentralized nature of 3D printing. In total, yes, it will always be less efficient. But imagine a world where an Apple product launch means access to a new fabber file. Everyone in the world with a fabber could download and print the new product ... at the same time. No centralized manufacturing and distribution network could match that.

Some additional hurdles you don't mention: Material cost. $6 a cubic inch (my costs today) are really quite high. Material diversity. I need multiple materials for many objects I'd like to print. Speed. It takes hours to print something of moderate size. If I can pop over to a store and get the same item manufactured in the traditional way, I probably will.

Finally, if by any chance, someone reading this comment hasn't read "The Diamond Age" by Stephenson, please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

The Diamond Age is about molecular nanotechnology and, while that will change the world, this ain't that.

"Everyone in the world with a fabber could download and print the new product ... at the same time. No centralized manufacturing and distribution network could match that."

So what happens when everyone is torrenting the fabber file on the launch date? Now you're pirating physical things over the net, not just data.

"imagine a world where an Apple product launch means access to a new fabber file. Everyone in the world with a fabber could download and print the new product ... at the same time. "

I can't imagine an Apple product that can be printed. Maybe you could print a plastic copy of the enclosure for the product, but what you'd have in your hand is a essentially a plastic design prototype. Which 3D printers are great for. But how would you print the PCB, copper traces, pcb components, battery, lcd display...etc.

These 3D printers are only really a manufacturing revolution to people pumping out plastic (or weak powdered metal) products in low volumes (<1,000 units) and sizes between a few mm and meter or two cube. That actually doesn't cover a whole lot of products - the unit numbers are the thing that rules out most things you would think of.

I think this is exactly the use case I am most excited for. Everyone can print their own objects (shared and personalized). Maybe even in their own house like desktop printing or, for more expensive equipment, just downtown like a Kinko's. Everyone can download, modify, and make unique objects with very little turnaround time and no minimum quantity.

Why not use 3-d printers to make blanks for castings and molds, and maybe streamline building jigs? I don't know anything about the field, really, so there may be a simple and obvious answer, but I would be curious about it.

We need to stop thinking like everyone needs a "job", like a factory job or being an employee of a huge corporation. Just because 80-90% of the working population does that today, doesn't mean that's always been the case or that it should always be the case. The Internet and decentralized businesses like the ones enabled by 3D printing will help create a lot of entrepreneurs in the future.

People need to think more in terms of how do I use the "cheap labor" (whether by people, or automatized) to create my own business, and less in terms of "let's ban cheap labor to protect our current jobs".

That being said, we should probably expect some new SOPA-like IP laws supported by the big manufacturing companies that will want to "save jobs" and make such technologies illegal.

Back while I was in undergrad, I interned for the VPs of engineering, manufacturing and sourcing at a US consumer products company. (None of them ever had an intern so I convinced them to reduce risk by sharing me.) Anyways, the company I worked for relied heavily on contract manufacturing in China. I was able to help encourage getting more prototypes printed here in the US for evaluation instead of waiting for the factories to tool prototypes and saved the company a bundle. The company lost a bunch of time and money shipping prototypes back and forth before they could even get to the production sampling stage.

I don't think that 3d printing is going to revolutionize manufacturing in the US. If 3d printing revolutionized anything it will be product design. Empowering designers to experiment and try new things without the fear of having to retool the factory is going to produce some cool stuff in the future.

Paper printers today are far from flawless. They consume a good portion of IT time (in companies and for those of us who are the family tech support).

I'm a tad skeptical of a universal printer. The reliability to print anything of a complex nature (beyond simple plastic molds) is a major concern.

Doing this at scale (putting this in each persons home) is a nice idea, I just don't think it's reliable enough.

I hope I'm wrong.

Somewhat related: Some of Vigor Vinge's touch on the problem of the "universal assembler" and how humanity couldn't substitute a universal assembler for a specialist economy.

Also, how do you distribute the basic materials to each home?

How do you print an ipad let alone a lithium ion battery pack without lithium?

You would need a true "universal assembler" convert one element into another. At that point...I don't think you are worrying about a "jobless" economy.

Beyond that, there's the problem of creating items to be printed, or even of modifying existing items. For the most part, the proliferation of laser printers and inkjet printers into homes has led to the creation of a lot of disastrous-looking fliers with horrible fonts and banded,posterized, poorly color-controlled photographs that quickly fade to blue.

Think for a minute about the photo-finishing industry. In theory, almost every home with a computer and digital camera also has an inkjet printer capable of producing photos. In practice, by the time you get the printer set up and properly calibrated, buy the right paper from the store, and finish color-correcting your images, it STILL COSTS MORE to print a snapshot at home than it does to get it made by the local Target or Wal-Mart. The exception is for pro or semi-pro artists who are printing canvas wraps or large-scale enlargements, in which case the investment on a large-format inkjet becomes pretty substantial.

The problem with the "maker proliferation" theory of society is that not everyone wants to be a maker -- in fact, I'd argue that not even 10% of people want to be makers. This is what the One Laptop Per Child project ultimately found out -- even most curious children don't really want to hack their computers, or build their own word processor.

If we end up with 3D printers in every home, I can guarantee that for the most part, we'll end up with a lot of crappy, expensive Christmas ornaments and paperweights.

Think farther. Photos aren't a good example, since it's only one type of thing you're creating, and you don't create them that often. This is more meta: it's a device to create a wide variety of things, that you will likely be creating often. One can imagine a world where the entire setup is simply a service, like internet access, where the owner can partake in any balance of consumption or creation they desire.

If the theory behind this article was true then tube socks would be made in your local store as opposed to some factory in China. If the socks business can't leave the factory, why do people think 3D printed good will leave?

All this progress will lead to is Chinese factories having smaller workforces. I visited a sock factory with a work force of a few thousand people producing few million socks per day. When you get to such scales your biggest cost is management oversight, which is why manufacturing is going to stay in large factories.

No real need for me to bring in China and socks. The same would be true photos, business cards, and books.

Shoes seemed like a bad example of what could be made with 3D printing. Even with advances in the current technology it would seem difficult to make something as flexible as shoe leather.

The same is true of clothing, curtains, etc.

It does seem reasonable to go after Ikea: break something on your dresser or desk? Use your own fabricator to print a replacement or get one tomorrow from Kinko's (or the equivalent)

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