I hope this does not come across as cynical.
As an engineer my first thought when I saw what it printed was how do you turn a bolt with a plastic wrench without breaking the wrench?
As an engineer my first thought when I saw what it printed was how do you turn a bolt with a plastic wrench without breaking the wrench?
Is it possible to UV-harden the plastic maybe to give it a harder surface?
I think it's just amazing that we're at this point anyways. Regardless of how good the tools are, we can print them in space.
We pay a tech who knows CAD and a fab house rather than a machine shop. A machine shop would probably cost a lot more. Although now that we have the design down pat, we wouldn't waste as much money on prototypes.
Our design includes 2" diameter threaded ends and it holds pretty firmly although the threads do wear out and tear off the tube with vibration and heat changes.
3D printing let us try and tune successive iterations for best performance far more rapidly than we could have done with classical subtractive machining. OTOH, our 3D printers care about the room temperature and HVAC breeze, whereas a lathe or mill wouldn't notice. Tradeoffs....