MTU Study: 3D printers may soon be in every home | Hacker News Reader

MTU Study: 3D printers may soon be in every home

3ders.org

47 pointsmakos42 comments

In the study, Pearce and his team chose 20 common household items listed on Thingiverse, such as cellphone accessories, a garlic press, a showerhead, a spoon holder, and the like.

Then they used Google Shopping to determine the maximum and minimum cost of buying those 20 items online, shipping charges not included. Next, they calculated the cost of making them with 3D printers. The conclusion: it would cost the typical consumer from $312 to $1,944 to buy those 20 things compared to $18 to make them in a weekend.

Oh come on. Like all those items online were made out of the same low-melt-point plastic and the 3d-printed ones were of equivalent quality. I'm very much pro 3d-printing but there's some serious reaching here.

The last page of the study (http://www.academia.edu/4067796/Life-Cycle_Economic_Analysis...) offers examples such as a shower head with prices ranging from $7.87 to $437.22, jewelry organizers from $9 to $109, and orthotics ranging from $99 to $800. There's a little bit more going on with the expensive ones than just being a heap of plastic that you can duplicate at home, I think.

I wondered whether the bicycle water bottle holder could really hold a heavy bottle as the bike vibrated, hit potholes, etc.

Just making something that looks the same does not mean it will perform the same.

For example, would the lemon juicer in the picture withstand the dishwasher for as long as the shop bought equivalent? If not, how many times would the printed version be replaced and at what cost?

I just don't yet buy, in the examples given, that the items are of equivalent performance, and that is if one were to generously say that they had equivalent aesthetic qualities.

3d printing will get there, but it's not there yet.

ABS is quite sturdy (it's what Lego is made of). You can also print polycarbonate with some all-metal hot-ends and a fume hood.

How much would it cost to install a fume hood? And what are the dangers?

For as something as cheap as a water bottle, I'd have zero worries.

A guy at the local hackerspace successfully printed a beefy motor mount with ABS. He also helped me design a tripod mount for holding my Nikon D600 vertically (lens pointing down); I have no concerns about it failing, even though the mount is going to be subject to CNC movements.

A good point. That's also a question of aestethics, I even wrote an article about that problem, maybe you'll like it:) http://blog.ultimaker.com/2013/04/04/pla-is-the-new-wood/

Quality not factored in as you say. Our time is also not considered. How many services/products do we buy only because it would cost us too much time to do it ourselves? That said, I think 3D printing has bright future as long-tail manufacturing.

I think the future is very bright - just that overselling it would actually delay that by disappointing some.

(Lightbulb) you know who really needs a good 3d printer? My local family-run hardware store

3d printing will truly be consumer ready when I could take out my phone and 'scan' the broken alarm clock housing, and within 10 minutes of tweaking with relatively easy to use software be able to print a replacement. Until then, a shapercube will sit in a closet and only get occasional 'geek' time to show to others.

One could envision something like "Take a photo of your broken thing", sending that photo off to an industrial/mechanical engineer who lives in (without loss of generality) China and can be employed profitably to do non-trivial work in CAD software to save $X0, and then sending the resulting IP to a local 3D printing firm who'd maintain expensive, fiddly equipment, make sure the printing process terminated successfully, and then give the product to either a gopher or UPS for delivery.

Now I question whether that makes more sense along any axis than "Buy a new alarm clock from a more-or-less-locally cached store of Chinese alarm clocks and cut out the middlemen", but it might be interesting to try.

or scan the box to pull up a parts database, click on the part you need replaced and have the printer pop it out.

What makes more sense (and that I've done myself) is to print out a part for some expensive appliance where the parts are either extremely expensive or just not available at all. For instance, a $1000 automatic espresso maker can have lots of moving plastic parts, and the rest of the machine might be in perfect working order save for that one broken part. And when you've made the replacement part it's easy to print another one, and share it with others.

Or another example (from some years ago), just to get one replacement part for my perfectly fine shower cabinet, I had to buy a complete set of plastic mounts, to the price of $160.

One could create a line of "open-source appliances", that had ease of maintenance as its main selling point, although catering to a part of the market that prefers fixing rather than buying stuff can be a little tough.

They probably don't need to be open-source appliances, though firms that insist on suing people who post open CAD drawings of their machine's parts will incur a competitive disadvantage.

What will happen is that groups of hobbyists will rapidly converge on the machines on the market that fit in a sweet spot of good design, affordability, and mod-ability, then amplify the effect by building up open libraries of printable parts.

I think of all the Honda Civics I saw in California. The Civic is a long-standing hobbyist car. Or think of all the iPhone add-ons you can buy or make. The iPhone is a far cry from "open hardware", but it's still a standard base for a hobbyist market.

I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that will push 3D printing across the chasm, but that doesn't mean it's ridiculous. One must start the market somewhere, and there seem to be enough hobbyists and prototypers around to keep things moving forward.

3D printing is rather useful in the research lab. For example, most biological research labs will have a piece of kit called an electrophoresis chamber. This is essentially a plastic, watertight box with two wire electrodes inside. These chambers will cost upwards of 800 dollars.

I drew up plans for my own electrophoresis chamber in Sketchup, uploaded it to Shapeways (https://www.shapeways.com/model/1240729/sds-page-tank-v6.htm...), and got it printed and sent to me for less than 70 bucks. Wiring it up cost less than a dollar.

By the way, does anybody know of similar services that are even less expensive? Shapeways seem to specialize in making little trinkets and gadgets, so I suspect my rather large, bulky box cost even more than it needed to.

love this anecdote. thank you for sharing. So many products out there like that. Overpriced and ready for disruption.

The Derisi Lab at UCSF has a repository of 3D models for parts they use in their (bio) lab: http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/index.php?page=3D

(Press release from 3D printer manufacturer: http://www.stratasys.com/resources/case-studies/medical/deri...)

If something can be made at home on a 3d printer, surely it can be made in a factory for less money with a better 3d printer. It could reduce the price of factory made parts, but it is hard to believe it would eliminate them.

I would love it if the affect of this was to make companies focus on better materials that can't be made at home. The price doesn't change but the product gets better. A lot of cyclists would prefer a $30 carbon fiber bottle cage to a home made plastic one for $10.

Except, if it is made in a factory you have:

• Transportation costs from factory to store • Cost for additional space required to hold stock

If it is sold through a store • Cost for display space in a store • Cost of a sales person selling the item • Cost for (neat) packaging • Cost of your time picking up the item

etc.

So while the factory can logically create the product cheaper it could still end up costing more.

I agree that posting and packing are always going to be a factor. The other points you mention are becoming less relevant as we move towards online buying. This is especially true of shops selling random obscure parts. Also, just think about how annoying normal 2d printers are. Sure you can print something at home; but it will be expensive and slow compared with the expensive laser printer at the office.

I know a biker would go for the weight savings of carbon fiber but check this out. Carbon fiber reinforced prints:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:91464

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1yOf6Ba1ts

The methodology behind this study is pretty shaky. Most concerning is that their main claim - that $312 is a lot more than $18 - isn't held up by much searching.

As an example, you can get a decent silicone nano wristband for $2.78 online. They listed $16.98 as the "total retail cost". Similarly, a plastic iPad stand (though of not the same design) can be ordered online for $1.27, while the study listed $16.99.

Many items' retail prices were about 2x-5x higher than they could have been.

Of course, the RepRap cost doesn't include the cost of getting a RepRap, nor the ridiculous amount of time it takes to even keep it running. And, of course, doesn't include the cost of all the failed builds you'll inevitably run into when trying to print things.

I keep seeing articles like this and thinking "these people are thinking about this wrong".

3D printers aren't better at making mass produced injection moulded plastic objects than injection moulding. They can (more or less) replicate the sort of mass-produced thing you can buy on Amazon that's been sailed here in shipping container loads from China – but if you're going to make a few thousand of them (or better still, a few tens of millions), then "the industry" has got the efficiency of that manufacturing and supply chain down to a very fine art. (In the same way that it's very difficult to match McDonalds on a calorie-per-dollar metric.)

What I believe will really make 3D printers "go viral", is when enough people work out that there's different, new categories of objects we can produce.

Things where only 50 or 100 people in the world are ever going to want - maybe a mount to fit an iPhone 4S with an extended battery case to the handlebars of a 2012 Vespa 125 Sport, or a bracket to hold an Arduino and a 2x40char LCD to the side of a pre 2005 Rancilio Silva espresso machine. I wonder how many things/objects get thought up, but discarded because "it'll got $x,000 to make a set of moulds, and there's only 100 people in the world who'd even consider buying this"?

I think there are also objects that right now don't exist because existing manufacturing techniques don't allow them to be (mass) produced - one of the cheaper 3D printers comes with a sample file of a Chess Rook (the "castle piece) with an internal spiral staircase inside it - a geometry that's physically impossible to create a mould you could extract the part from (without destroying the mould). I wonder how many things/objects get thought up then "discarded" because "you can't make that"?

I see people trying to print 3D plastic guns using more or less "traditional" gun shapes and designs. That's just wrong (though I have some grudging admiration for the people doing it for largely political/anarchist motivations). What we need is for people to start developing the knowledge and experience with 3D printing materials – so they've got the same sort of "gut feel" for sizes/configurations/suitability of various options to design parts, as "old school" welders have about what size/shape/configuration of steel stock and gussets/bracing is "strong enough" for your boat-trailer/golf-buggy/go-kart. People who can go "that might work, but how about we over-engineer that section a bit more, 'cause it seems a little close to the material limits". People who can go "Lets 3D scan that metal bracket, then adjust the thickness of those planes and increase the gusset radius along that intersection, and add some webbing around those holes, then it'll be 'strong enough' to replace the original metal part".

I look forward to that – and I suspect it'll start happening in a fairly short timeframe.

Completely agree. 3D printing enables long-tail manufacturing.

You're thinking along the right lines. I'd only emphasize that one should be on the lookout for things with a personalized component. Rings and bracelets that fit absolutely perfectly. Eyeglasses that are 95% standard parts off a shelf, but incorporate three printed parts that can be adjusted to make the glasses fit your face more perfectly than any others in their price range. That sort of thing.

Designs that only 100 people in the world want are a fine thing, but they will still require design, and that will make them expensive and hard to get right. Individualized things that only one person in the world wants, but which millions of people might want a tiny variation of, may be where the real money is.

While I agree that people need to look at 3D printing as it's own thing and not v.01 of a star treck replicator that allows you to avoid shopping for little plastic thing. There are still plenty of little plastic things that cost huge multiples of there mass produced manufactoring costs, aka a little plastic lever used in the trip odomitor of a 20 year old car the first 20 million of them sold out so now it's small batches pluss warehousing and shipping costs which can easily make such things cost 100+$.

>I keep seeing articles like this and thinking "these people are thinking about this wrong".

Agreed. I thought this quote exemplified that "wrong thinking":

"Say you are in the camping supply business and you don't want to keep glow-in-the-dark tent stakes in stock," Pearce said. "Just keep glow-in-the-dark plastic on hand, and if somebody needs those tent stakes, you can print them."

So, rather than a pre-packaged, sku'd, retail product on your shelf, you're going to keep some glow in the dark plastic on hand and take the time and effort to pay someone to print them?

That's not where the benefits are.

Make sense. But then one of the item on his table is an orthopaedic insole, an item that is custom made for one's foot. I can totally see orthopaedist, dentist etc... have a 3D printer in their office to manufacture one-of-a-kind insole, dental cap, or even prescription lenses.

Invisalign braces and Vivera retainers are already 3D printed (using UV photopolymer and a laser). They just do it at a factory, because the 3D printer that can produce that level of detail/strength is terribly expensive.

Exactly. I need those orthotics and I'd love to be able to get a custom version for less than the pros charge now. I think both orthopedists and dentists already have pretty sophisticated 3D tools today, though.

So true. Most manufacturing engineers who have worked with injection molding have also worked with rapid prototyping techniques like 3d printing and know the differences in application very well. Journalists don't quite seem to grasp the difference yet.

The great contribution 3d printers will make is in small-scale production and I wish people would stop talking how 3d printing will "disrupt" this or that.

like this?

Gyro the Cube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5Zx02qAacA A Vortex Tied in Knots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja886GtHlcE

Most of this is done with plastic, no? What would be cool is that the plastic from no-longer-used printouts could be recycled thru the machine.

Kipple: I worry about the amount of plastic kipple these things will generate.

With the filastruder project (DIY plastic filament extruder) that should be possible. However, 3D printers don't like too much recycled material (at least not for ABS) so you would have to add it along with new ABS pellets.

On the upside - there's a possibility that a few 3D printed components could save a lot of 99.5% "working" manufactured assemblies from ending up in landfill.

Why would i want one at home? I do not even have a 2d printer! I can handle nearly all of my stuff without paper so it is a lot cheaper to go to the copyshop next door.

I know a 3d printer is used in a different way but I would rather go to a 3d print shop with high quality printers and a good choice of materials and post print services (polishing, coloring, ...).

With this study, I can finally justify the ROI of a 3D printer to my CFO (my wife).

Of course they leave off the cost of the print in that $18 estimate.

with this, can I print money bills?

Only if you're a bank. Or the FED.

And your country's money happens to be made out of ABS...

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