3-D Printing, robotics swing manufacturing might from China back to the U.S.
forbes.com
forbes.com
The 'hobby' ones are still very rough. Think Altair/IMSAI level of personal computer. The lack of a reasonable filler/support material (so that you can print 'voids' and later dissolve out the filler) means that a lot of obviously useful shapes are unprintable at the moment (horizontal tubes for example). But the writing is, as they say, on the wall. My instinct is that plastic printing will overtake injection molding for small run products in as few as 10 years.
The biggest challenge to robotics in the US market has been organized resistance. Ford had the most productive auto plant in the world, in Brazil, because it was mostly robotic. They tried, and failed, to get it built in the US. But the depth and length of this recession has changed the politics on that to the point where 'any' jobs trumps 'no' jobs, even if the 'any' comes with the uncomfortable reality that nobody in the new plant will be able to work without at least a solid high school diploma and 2 years of apprenticing. The 'high paying' jobs will require a four year degree in manufacturing technology.
Of course, true small run stuff isn't usually injection molded anyway, due to the amount of time and effort and high grade tool steel it takes to make the mold.
Where 3D printing really IS changing things is prototyping and the occasional one-off part, but we're quite far off production usage.
Makerbot charges $45 per KG for their raw material, whereas steel (in bulk) is more like $1/kg, and even in small orders (like say small bar stock) is $10-$15/kg.
But I am very new to this; it's only a hobby; i'm checking out 2nd hand CNC machines, but in my mind that's for the next step, after the prototyping.
Honestly, for prototyping for small amounts of money, your best bet is probably a bridgeport-type vertical mill. You can do turning/lathe operations on one of those too with the right accessories. Not automated, and not fast, but if you need to make one off parts it's about your only option for hobbyist-type money. You'd be buying used, obviously, and you'd need a garage/workroom (This isn't something you set up in your house)...
There are some fairly economical small CNC machines now (We're talking $2k or so, price-wise), but they are intended primarily for model makers - any part over about 2"-3" and they literally can't cut it, where-as with a good manual milling machine and some time/sweat, you will typically have 24" x 24" x 10" travel available.
As with computers, if a 3D printer is cheap enough you can run 200 in parallel to get production rates into the 'few thousand widgets per day' Today the surface finish and the materials are not up there (but a 2K byte Altair 8800 wasn't really a contender to do desktop publishing either :-)
The thing you have to be careful of is this: "That's also ignoring that the plastics you can injection mold have better mechanical properties and surface finishes, too." because that thinking will bite you back. It just has to be 'good enough' and cheaper and it puts those characteristics into the 'nice to have' category. I agree that there will probably always be a market for some injection molding but I can see that it will be the 'specialized' stuff and not the 'general' stuff. Just a matter of time.
In manufacturing, processes are used that have a minimum number of steps. Cycle time is critical. Even CNC doesn't have that much penetration outside of a very few select industries, namely aerospace and some automotive. Very little, if anything, on a consumer product will be CNC made, for much the same reasons 3D printing will have a very hard time catching on for production.
One real niche for CNC is actually making molds for injection molding - that's one case where taking dozens of hours to cut a single part isn't a problem, as that one mold can stamp hundreds of thousands of parts.
Source: I'm actually a manufacturing engineer by training.
EDIT: And yes, I think 10 years is much too soon. Industry has a huge amount of money invested in existing factories. Much of that equipment is useable for decades to come. You would have to get quite a bit better than the existing standard for them to even think about replacing the existing lines.
I suspect that much of the challenge with CNC penetration is with the costs involved. But could easily be wrong.
Current injection molding does make thousands per hour and that's certainly achievable with thousands of 3D printers running in parallel, but the place where I think you will first see disruption will be in the 'short run' segments, where people would make 100,000 parts (minimum run) and only sell 10,000 units. Their price per unit was effectively 10x in that case. But they have no other way to get to 10,000 at the moment. In the compute space that is how the market disrupted, lower performance of the unit offset by the savings of not having to over provision for the compute capacity. Will be interesting to watch.
So Tim Cook announces Apple's intention to do this at the end of May, and this is somehow "following suit" when Google hadn't even announced the Nexus Q yet (June 27)?
>We can only guess. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that just as we have created new, higher-paying jobs in every other industrial transition, we will create a new set of industries and professions in this one.
What are average humans capable of that robots aren't?
The whole "where is it built" thing is dumb, though. But still, if you're going to take afront, this doesn't seem like the right spot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...
Crickets.
Even the robots aren't created in USA - some are Kuka robots from Germany.
3D printers are probably going to be a boost for Mexico and low cost countries in Europe. That is if they get their act together.
You need to realize that the personal computer market was all DIY and academic demos until Lotus 123 on the Apple came out. That filled a niche in business. When the PC came out it was supported by a 'real' company (Apple was not considered much of a company then). I would expect a similar trend in 3D printing. Some niche will open up and cause a lot of 'enterprise' money to be spent there and then one of the printer companies will jump in with the kind of product these things will evolve into. (And you'll get to complain to your grandkids about all the beige 3D printers are so boring, you remember when they were innovative and quirky)
Much of the AI stuff has been in pick and place robots (see the Japanese competition on this) and the military's use.
There is a very large DIY contingent building CNC machines of all flavors, not just the basic lathes and mills, but routers, benders, presses, wireforming tools, etc. Take a look around cnczone.com; you can waste hours on that site.
The DIY part of the industry needs software. The dominant tools are still very basic and there doesn't seem to be much support for 4 and 5-axis machining because most DIYers are only building 3-axis machines at most. So there may not be a huge number of jobs, but there is room to make your mark writing software for the home-built project machines.
I'm awaiting the day someone posts their design for a 5-axis homebuilt mill fully integrated with their own CAM software. I think that person will become very rich.
You can see some of our stuff here: http://rec.ri.cmu.edu/
I suspect it may be one of those near-prophetic works of science fiction that will amaze future generations - "How'd he see that coming?"
The same applies for anything from textiles (we can now buy clothing for a few dollars that would once have only been available to royalty) to electronics (in a world where almost everybody carries a mobile phone).
The long work weeks continue because apparently we are willing to trade less time at work for more stuff. If you want to live a 1960s lifestyle with a 60s size house, 60s level health care, 1 car per family, only 60s era gadgets, and cooking the vast majority of your meals--you could easily do it on 20 hours a week for most jobs.
As an experiment to illustrate my point, look around the room you're in and count the things that you own that didn't exist in 1960.
There's no reason to assume that this time it will be different.
Automated manufacturing is vastly more reliable and higher-quality than anything manual labor can pull off. As the standard of living rises in China and cost of labor exceeds the threshold, automation will take over just like it has here.
The death of US manufacturing is a little overblown (though not entirely) - what people are really talking about when they bemoan the death of American manufacturing is the death of American manufacturing jobs.
Exactly, if you look at manufacturing output, America has remained a leader [1], but the number of people employed by manufacturers has gone down. The recession did put a dent in that increase of course.
[1] http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/02/17/usa-china-and...
From someone who worked for a large automotive supplier, which does a lot of manufacturing here in germany, that wanted to release a consumer device I heard that you can get the whole product finished in china for the price of sourcing the components in europe.