Kinematics Bodice
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n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com
It's not that the technology doesn't exist yet, it does.
Is the bottleneck at the factories? Too expensive to incorporate/replace existing mass production equipment?
Whoever jumps first, is going to have a huge 1st mover advantage.
Production is also a problem. Small Batch production is typically 5-10x more expensive than the long lead time Large Batch production. Individual production can be up to 100x more expensive. The cut isn't the problem; a master tailor might allocate 5-10% of the 10-30 hours of making a bespoke suit to matters of cut. Cut is also one of the few areas where small batch manufacturers have cost parity with large batch manufacturers. Assembly is what makes custom production so difficult. Even with super-precision robotics, dexterity is a huge problem. Most large batch manufacturers only automate 5-10% of the total stitches for a garment...the rest is done by high-dexterity human hands.
Its a hard problem. A more solvable problem would be to drastically expand the number of possible size options, and use state of the art supply chain techniques to bring them to cost parity with larger companies and their smaller size selections. I'd be interested in doing quite that if I found the right co-founder...but that itself is a problem of its own :)
If you are overweight it could show ads of gyms/treatments/diet-food; not that there is anything wrong with that, BUT think about the new industry that opens up for penis enlargenment spammers.
Living the joke behind, I think is worth to think about the implications if/when something like this gets implemented.
Example: I don't want Glass or personalized search, nor do I want body scanners, and I am completely fine without custom-clothes tech. My preferences shouldn't apply to all HNers.
I have a feeling that the data would be more likely to be peddled to McDonald's than 24 Hour Fitness.
When you have enough money to pay them more than the brands and retailers who are buying their ad services.
If anything being sponsored by its industry, like a technology standards authority, should make it less likely to make exclusive agreements.
However, some of the examples I've seen of the clothes include issues that a tailor would have fixed, like a roll between your neck and shoulders. Maybe it works like a Flowbee does for haircuts, and it just applies a consistent offset from your body, rather than understanding which areas should be close fitting or loose. That the descriptions talk about precision to fractions of a millimeter makes it sound naive about what matters to a skilled tailor.
However, it doesn't sound like there is anything preventing multiple users from using the same measurements, whether they make suits, jeans, undergarments, or wetsuits.
For example, a cnc fabric cutter could cut all the panels out of stock kept on site, and a person could then sew the panels together into an actual outfit. Would require quite a bit of initial outlay for the materials (less if the pattern on the material is printed on-site), and the hourly wages of a sewer on site, but I think it would certainly be doable.
PS, kudos to the designer for being willing to model something so revealing.
* design was printed in a flattened form
* wearable straight out of the printer
* no pieces were manually assembled and no fasteners were added
My wife practices German longsword, and it's hard for her to find padded armor that fits precisely - men's jackets aren't cut right, and women's jackets are too small. Women's gloves are too small, and men's gloves are too big.
If she could get a full-body kit printed out of metal that would be strong enough to stop a sword thrust, she'd be all set. (A few thousand dollars poorer, probably, but all set.)
I doubt that older designs would help with losing a leg to a roadside bomb, either, but someone more qualified than I am would be in order to answer this.
Those sheets stop lower power bullets, all the body armor that stops high power weapons has large ceramic panel inserts.
Besides ceramics there are things like metal–graphene nanolayered composites that hold the promise tipping the armor/firepower balance back in the favor of armor.
Seems like something where advances in 3d printing in different materials would benefit.
Typical sintering temperatures are around 1000 to 1300 degC. Usually about 2/3 the melting point of the ceramic; enough to promote ionic motion leading to fusing of the powder in a reasonable amount of time (one-two hours for my lab-sized samples).
Various techniques for lowering the sintering temperature are:
- Increase the sintering time. The time required to achieve a given density (say, 95%) increases somewhat rapidly as you decrease the temperature
- Add a glass to the ceramic powder. The glass melts and essentially lubricates things so there is sufficient motion at lower temperature.
- Start with finer ceramic powder. This has higher surface area for a given amount, which is an energetically unfavorable state (the fused state has lower surface energy and is thus more favorable).
- Apply pressure while sintering [3]
- Live with less density. Pottery needn't be 95+% dense. Clay (or playdough) can be useful for some situations (not bullet-proof vest I imagine) if just let to air dry.
- Other clever things I don't know about.
I know there are metallic substances that can survive sintering processes, as in multi-layer ceramic capacitors, where a sandwich of ceramic/electrode/ceramic/electrode is sintered, but these tend to be the expensive metals that don't react with oxygen [1].
The polymer with the highest melting point I know of is Kapton [2], melting around 400 degC, which is quite a way from the 800 or so degC you might see after adding glass to your ceramic powder...
All that said, most ceramics are not that tough in that they shatter when impacted. If you must 3D print bullet-proof armor, and are sure you can't print some kind of Kevlar-reinforced thing, then I'm not really sure what the best option is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_capacitor#Multi-layer_...