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Comment by EvanMiller | Hacker News Reader

MYTH: 3D printers will never be able to print underwear

FACT: Wrong. Hard plastic underwear provides amazing protection and support

MYTH: 3D printers will never be able to print the Mona Lisa

FACT: Wrong again. Today you can download a 3D model for "rectangular hard plastic canvas" from the Internet, print it out using your Makerbot, and then paint the Mona Lisa on it

MYTH: 3D printers will never be able to print small, wobbly, leaky coffee cups that warp when hot beverages are poured into them, and that lacerate your lips when you attempt to drink from them

FACT: This is already possible on some of today's higher-end 3D printers

MYTH: 3D printers are useful in any way

FACT: It turns out this myth is true. Watching a 3D printer emit a hard plastic object in a color that nobody wants keeps nerds in a state of rapture that prevents them from engaging in more dangerous activities such as shooting heroin or starting actual businesses

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I read this in the voice of an IBM mainframe sales person in about 1980, when confronted with an Apple II.

More seriously, today's 3D printers are mere toys compared to what a future atom-scale assembler could do. But they are clearly useful to some people and fun for other right now.

The Microcomputers of the '70s and '80s absolutely were toys back then too, by comparison with the bigger iron available at orders of magnitude higher prices. But they were useful, and they started us on the road to volume production that allows me to have a supercomputer in my pocket and a half-dozen supercomputer-class portable machines hanging around my home office. Not to mention all the audio gear I have built around processors ranging from a Z80 though modern microcontrollers to some very powerful DSPs.

Perhaps 3D printers are toys. But they are wonderful toys that will take us to interesting places.

Just because it happened for personal computers isn't a guarantee that it will happen with home 3D printers.

It's nice to be excited about this tech but you need to pay attention to what potential customers are saying, too.

We need to find the Visicalc of home 3D printing.

So, what do people need custom physical objects for? Especially rigid stuff? Generally things are rigid either because the application they serve requires the structural rigidity, or because the application they serve requires chemical properties that produce rigidity as a side-effect.

If something doesn't have to be rigid, then there are real cost advantages to having it be flexible (such as ease of packing and shipping).

So, I ask again: what are common, small, rigid objects which are too expensive now (because of production, transport, or rapid wear)? Eyeglass frames are one thing I can think of. Orthodontic retainers are another.

Truly, as I think about all the smallish, plastic things that are available in stores, the only thing that comes to mind as an effective use of 3D printing is to pirate children's toys. Those usually are marked up dramatically because of licensing costs with the movie/TV companies, but otherwise, they're just cheapo plastic. If you can print them at home for a fraction of the cost, and then sell to your friends as well, that could be very interesting...

It would be hard for movie companies to enforce against you, because it's physical peer to peer, and there's no way to trace the artifact back to its producer.

> the only thing that comes to mind as an effective use of 3D printing is to pirate children's toys.

That is as solid an argument as suggesting that the only use for a camera is to pirate artwork. Or the only point of digital media is to pirate other people's work.

If I had kids, the opportunity to design and make toys of our own design might be compelling enough (particularly if you could get a 3D printer for $250 or so).

But, like early microcomputers, we may not have found the killer app yet. Right now, we are at the blinkinglights stage of 3D printing. These things are incredibly primitive, but they are still fun for some people and useful for others. Give it some time, and something interesting will happen.

You're wrong. If you step outside the narrow world of software for a minute and look at tangible product design, 3D printing is wonderfully useful. One benefit is that it allows you to develop functional prototypes without shelling out for evaluation tooling of injection molds. Second, it's faster. Third, it can produce structures that would be difficult or impossible to produce using conventional machining or casting methods.

I don't think anyone doubts that you can make amazing structures with 3D printers. This sectional technique is a nice extension to that. What I find annoying with the current 3D printing hype is that material properties are being completely overlooked. I can make a brake disk out of sponge cake about as easily as I could print one in plastic. Neither will work though.

There's some exciting work going on at Cambridge with 3D printing using metal powders and laser sintering, but these printers will be orders of magnitude pricier than desktop plastic printers for some time.

Perhaps a nice interim approach for the maker crowd would be to combine 3D printing with lost wax or sand casting. That way, you could still print an intricate part but then use it as a pattern to create something much stronger in metal.

Metal-based laser sintering (SLS) has been used in high-end research and industry labs for the better part of 10 years (or more!). It's just the democratization provided by outfits like ShapeWays that is making it available to the masses.

People already use the casting solution you suggest. I remember the early Autom (robot) prototype used silicone casts [1]. I'm sure there are many other examples too...

[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/11/22/building-robot-heads-u...

No need to be mean.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". He also was completely right at his time.

He clearly wasn't a visionary, but a pragmatist. Pragmatists deal in what they can do right now, and if it's useful to anyone right now. If it isn't, they ignore it. Visionaries thinks about the potential in the future and how it will be useful in the future.

While a little snarky, all these points are completely valid. Plastic has limitations, _physical_ limitations, that prevent its use in real mechanical parts. 3D printing is great for desk toys or rapid prototyping, but we will never be printing cars or printing computers like everyone implies.

Computer chips are complicated. Engines have to sustain miniature explosions thousands of times a second. Plastics have limitations, and people need to realize this before hyping 3D printing too far

They aren't valid at all -- 3D printing isn't limited to plastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering

http://www.solid-scape.com/products/solidscape-3d-wax-printe...

http://www.contourcrafting.org/

Also, plastic 3D printing is a low-part-order replacement for injection molding, and is significantly cheaper for short-run or prototyping. And it is not designed to be a one-stop solution, but simply part of a workflow that can be brought to small fabrication shops to permit them to construct a wider range of things.

That said, the biggest limitation of the Makerbot series of printers in my opinion is the lack of a soluble support material. The Dimension printers [1] allow you to fabricate models with both a structural plastic (ABS) and a support material (unknown) that will dissolve in a lye bath, meaning you can make complex mechanical components in one pass and then dissolve out the unnecessary sections.

[1]: http://www.dimensionprinting.com/

I think most people are aware 3D printing is available in other materials. However, all personally affordable 3d printers use plastic, mostly producing low quality goods that has limited uses. Not everyone can afford a $150,000 SLS 3d printer.

Makerbot does sell a water soluble PLA filament that you can use with your normal PLA filament on the dual extruder replicator. It's less troublesome than a lye bath.

    MYTH: 3D printers will never be able to print underwear

You may jest, but: http://www.shapeways.com/n12_bikini

I don't see the point in those "myths", as they appear to have been defined after the fact. Why not defining progress as what it is? I'd prefer a message like this:

"We're able to do X!"

What's the point of using the myth-variant of this message?

"We debunked the 'myth' that X is impossible!"

... especially if most of those "myths" actually were never stated before?

The point is that 3D printing hype is so hyperbolic, I actually took several seconds to read that first part about underwear before realizing that it was a spoof, because it almost sounds like the kind of thing that 3D printing enthusiasts might actually say. Snarky humor is a dangerous slippery slope in online forums, but it did make me laugh.

3D printing enthusiasts are eager to draw analogies to the personal computer revolution. However, another plausible analogy is something like the Segway "revolution". Discuss.

I don't really understand why people are so excited about 3D printers when CNC mills are cheaper, more precise, and work with any material from balsa wood to granite (including metals and plastics). (I also don't understand why 3D printers are a "revolution", when computerized production has been around for decades and everything you own had a CNC mill involved at some point in the production process.)

I've used a 3D printer before. It was fun and it didn't produce a mess, which was nice, but all I have to show for it is some ugly chunks of ABS that look kind of like a child just had some fun with very melty crayons. One time when I was 5, I made a snowman out of hot glue. That's still beyond the range of $1000 3D printers.

I don't know if you'd categorize it as "useful," but Laika used 3D printing to do some exceptional work on ParaNorman. But again, it required a lot of retouching and detail work. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/visual-ef...

What use is a newborn baby?

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