Posted on 12/02/2014 8:26:58 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I don’t think I get this 3D printer thingy. I picturing something from The Jetsons where you push a button and a steak and a beer appear. Or chicolate.
What are the realistic benefits of 3D technology in your opinion? For instance, will it have more impact on manufacturing or consumers? Speaking as a layman it seems as if no-one knows for sure how this technology will play out.
Ping
It will play out over the next few decades to the point where 3D bio-printers can build you a new heart out of your own grown tissue.
Large, mobile printers will build roads, buildings, bridges, dams..etc
Advanced printers, better known as assemblers, will be able to create complete electronic devices.
The technology will mean that large, low-wage workforces will no longer be an asset. poor China...
Almost everything will become extremely cheap and disposable...
The most valuable commodities will be the detailed plans for creating products.... if you think the copyright woes of the music and movie industry were intense just wait for this one to hit.
The best thing about 3d printers is the boost it has given to kids learning useful things. It’s almost like back in the days of science fairs.
3D printing will eventually take its place among the other manufacturing processes, but it is no going to replace them significantly, except in a few niches such as prototyping. You can mold a part in a fraction of a second; printing can take hours. The technology may take off in the micro manufacturing realm, dentistry and medicine, etc.
There are fifty year old pictures predicting 3d printing of habitat structures on the Moon...
You left out cooking- I heard that you can now 3d print your dinner- the article may be on wired dot com
In the 1970’s I was screen printing PC boards with photographic methods. Still have the equipment. Anything that can be printed on paper or transparent sheets can be transferred to copper foil on G10 fiberglass PC board. It was precision of it’s day. Simple mass production.
Lithography
“However there are other techniques that would allow you to use steel and construct that barrel.”
It is called SLS or laser sintering. I have all of my designed parts made of this process with fiberglass filled nylon. It is far stronger than FDM and is in use on limited production pieces on some of my projects. I do not possess a machine but the price is about half of FDM when using two sources both of which are far less than the “street’ sources like Solid Concepts and the other big players who dominate the marketing side.
SLS is also capable of using different metal powders in the same way to produce weapons that can stand the pressures.
Political power grows out of the nozzle of a 3-D Printer.
Look up “RepRap”. 3d printer that makes copies of itself.
Is there anything reasonably priced in the market that can print a plastic object with very smooth outside surfaces, the way a part would come out of an injection mold?
Your post is full of errors:
handheld lasers are measured in milliwatts mW , not megawatts - Mw
Any Chinese company offering to sell a 1000mW laser for $20 is selling a 100mW fake. An actual 1000mW laser will cost at least $70.
The most powerful handheld diode lasers are blue/purple 3500mW, which cost somewhat over $200. Any company offering lasers over 3500mW are selling fakes.
Price: $300, which is why I don't own one yet.
Did you have to pay sales tax? I bet you got it at one of those wild-and-wooly shady gun shows! You know, where you can buy artillery and Nazi memorabilia without a background check.
Sure, you can print braces and similar parts. But the motors to move in three directions and to push the filament into the heated extruder are not printable (in plastic). Those are the expensive items and this guy uses motors from e-scrap. However, the stepper motors are around $20 and you need four or five; the heated extruder (mostly made of metal) is probably under $100. An even better machine is buildable for under $200, but this guy has a decent approach.
Yeah, I got the 3d printing bug.
See my #20.
I thought you said you didn’t get it?
WOW!
It'd work okay for a gyrojet, or the 40mm high-low pressure chamber system of the 40mm M79/M203 grenade launcher. I know, since in the early 1980s, we were considering a double-barreled, over and under alternative to the Sten gun as a possible item for mass production and airdrop to a potential arming of the Polish resistance Solidarity movement. As it turned out, the actual manufacture of those [and other nifty tools for a potential Polish resistance movement, including an anti-tank version of the Claymore mine, based on the Rockeye cluster bomb munition] was unnecessary, since even the thought of one Soviet *fraternal socialist* country engaged in such acts could well have given the others similar ideas. Would Reagan have done it? Above my pay grade. But the Soviets backed down, and Poland is now one of the few bright spots of relative individual freedom in Europe.
Speaking of the 9mm Sten, I suppose you know that during WWII, some Stens had barrels that were made of a flat rectangular steel plate with 4 grooves milled diagonally across it, which was then bent around a mandrel and fusion-welded at the joint seam and chambered. Nowadays, that'd be done with an Appel-process hammer forging, but even 75 years ago, there were production shortcuts that worked pretty well when the economies of scale were right. Some of those Stens were produced for less than $5,00 each; the 7 magazines that accompanied each gun in its waxed cardboard shipping carton cost more to build than the gun did. And that caused US Army Ordnance to look real hard at the $200 per copy M1928A1 Thompson and $85 per M1A1 versions, and come up with the M3 and M3A1 *grease guns* at circa $18 each instead.
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