Posted on 01/05/2013 1:40:44 PM PST by Olog-hai
3-D printing technology, used industrially for the last few decades, is poised to break into the mass market. Its endless and swiftly developing possibilities—from entrepreneurial manufacturing to the potential sculpting of human organs—could become the next industrial revolution. …
Assembling, screwing together, adhering, welding—all these processes are rendered obsolete when even the most complex shapes can be produced by a single machine using this casting technique. The end result can be an artificial hip, a hearing aid, a cell phone case, customized footwear or even the Urbee, a prototype car that has been making a splash. …
The only limits are set by the selection of materials, the space needed for each individual printed object and one other very important factor: time. Three-dimensional printing as currently practiced is a long, slow process. …
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Printable Houses and the Future Opportunity Therein
http://www.wfs.org/content/printable-houses-and-future-opportunity-therein
In Denmark, a printable house
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/design-architecture/in-denmark-a-printable-house/6130
Printable houses are coming
http://www.kurzweilai.net/printable-houses-are-coming
Students 3D print a boat from milk jugs — are jetliners next?
http://gcn.com/articles/2012/07/31/3d-printing-milk-jug-boats-to-airliners.aspx
That is one big may.
3-D printing supports a limited variety of rigid and flexible thermoplastics and some (but not all) powdered metals. Its strong feature is the ability to create a near net shape part with no tooling. What I would call show and tell models for marketing meetings.
The process is inherently slow as it builds the part at a rate determined by the laser spot diameter and the melting point of the material. When using powdered metal the process slows down because of the higher melting point of metals requires the laser to dwell longer to insure fusion.
Conventional powdered metal production puts the powder in a die, presses it to near net shape, and sinters it in a furnace with a reducing atmosphere. This produces a strong metal matrix which is porous. If your part needs to be completely solid you pass them back through the hydrogen atmosphere furnace with a small copper block in contact with the sintered part. The copper melts, capillary attraction sucks the copper in and brazes the part into a solid piece. You'll note that the conventional PM process can produce hundreds of parts at a time with the only tooling being a pressing die, whereas the 3-D printer builds one part a few molecules at a time.
Another aspect of the 3-D printing process is the selection of materials suitable for fabrication is limited. If you are working with electric motors and such you need materials that can be magnetized and demagnetized rapidly. If you are designing gear trains you'll need materials that are heat treatable. Some parts need to be hard all the way through. Some parts need a hard surface for a few ten thousandths and a relatively softer core for impact strength. &c. &c. &c.
In sum, 3-D printers will be useful for producing tooling (dies, master patterns, core boxes). This will speed up the prototype development process while permitting final tweaking of a design while avoiding major expense in production tooling early in the design cycle.
Regards,
GtG
Remember the 1950’s sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet”?
And the story of the lost civilization, “the Krell”?
And, before the overnight collapse of their world, the gigantic “machine” that they had been working on?
That could “create matter” of any shape, anywhere, at the mere will of an individual...?
But “Robby” the robot did the same thing.
Please add me to the ping list.
or even the Urbee, a prototype car that has been making a splash. …
***That’s the first I’ve heard of this Urbee project. It’s the 2nd useful thing these 3d printers will be good for.
Done.
“the most powerful motor was a small block with mechanical fuel injection (a 327 with about 390 horses).”
The 356 small block in a 58 Corvette that we ran in 58 dyno’d at 430 HP with factory fuel injuction and gasoline.
We ran and won the Guadalahara State Fair in 1958 and sold the Cer to the Rogriguez Brothers after the race.
Speaking of that, it’d be nice to see a new Corvette with the original Stingray look; they could make it look far closer to the 1959 Bill Mitchell Stingray. Would kinda fit with how the newer pony cars are using a modernized look from the late 60s.
Current materials include heat treatable steels.
At the retail level no one cares if it takes overnight to print out a new toaster. You only need one.
If you owned the machine, you’d be able to build anything you wanted in hours to maybe days. Less time than it would take to go shopping, or for Amazon to ship one to you.
It would be like owning your own oven. You don’t bake every day, and when you do, you don’t find an hour’s wait for cupcakes objectionable.
You’re not Hostess, you don’t need to bake 100,000 Twinkies a week.
Methinks you are missing the possibilities in large-scale customization (i.e. single item to short production runs for which producing dies/forms isn’t profitable). Also for producing replacement parts for items that are no longer made, but still in use.
Many of the disadvantages you cite are or are being whittled away. In some cases, the properties can be MORE closely controlled than for regular mass production methods.
One very interesting concept is one which combines “positive” (i.e. deposition-based) 3D machining with “subtractive” (i.e. removal of material with standard CNC) in the same device:
http://store.qu-bd.com/category.php?id_category=23
It looks like their price for the combined unit will be on the order of ~$2500.
My company bought a Roland MDX-40 (not normally thought of as a production machine), and it has paid for itself many times over in short-run production of very specialized parts...the QU-BD unit has FAR more capabilities and costs ~1/4 as much as the Roland did when we purchased it.
This is going to be fun. My entire life I’ve been on the cutting edge of technology. I’m easily bored and have job hopped all my life. I hope you young people can experience the same, I had fun.
I was working for a tool and die company in the early 70s when some old fart walks in and wants to tie silicon wafers together to make solar cells. Next time I see the guy he has a sign on his car that says Arco Solar.
Then I go to work for a company that is making hard drives for Lawrence Livermore. These things are over 12 inches in diameter.
Next, I go to work for Xerox. We have Colt 45s on our drafting tables, anti-tank guns, TOW anti-tank weapons, we are climbing over tanks and placing lasers in everything to create laser tag for the military. We put a plywood tank up on our rooftop in Pasadena and shot it from the shopping center next door. The place was immediately surrounded by police.
Then I go to work for a company that makes air-born printers. I would later go back to work for this company making some of the first desktop printers.
I made a mistake in turning down a job at JPL because I had an opportunity to design one of the first desktop computers because it paid more. 20 years later when applying for another job there, they remembered me and I wasn’t hired.
I worked on laser guidance systems, hill-top command centers, navy ships, satellites, fighter jets and transports. I worked on the camera that films fighter jets bombing their targets. I had a job where we doubled the speed of making fiber optic filaments.
I worked on tank and truck simulators for the military that got me into working for the entertainment industry designing special effects for places like Iwerks, Disney and Universal Studios.
I bought my first computer in something like 1985 (?), a Timex Sinclair. We wrote our own programs and stored them on cassette tapes. I built my first computer in 1988 for $3,500. I bought the parts at a computer swap meet. At that time, I was working for a military contractor and they had just gotten into Computer Aided Design (CAD). We weren’t allowed to learn CAD because we, being American men were not suited to sitting behind a computer screen. The jobs were given to women and Asian men.
Eventually, a company I worked with gave me a class in CAD. There were no public schools offering classes. After getting fired from that job I BSed my way into a CAD job where I didn’t even know how to turn the computer on. In this job we worked 12 hour shifts. I would leave and someone else would take over. We were all supportive of each other, sharing knowledge, teaching each other. That is the important part to this, sharing technology.
We were moved as a group 20 miles north where we were supposed to receive our input from the women and Asians working on the mainframe CAD computers to do our drawings. We kicked ass and the desktop computer became king. We were after all, designers and engineers before computers came along.
In the early 90s, I couldn’t find anyone interested in the internet, no one at the computer swap meets and no one in computer clubs. Eventually I found someone giving away free classes.
With all the obstacles in our way, all the major players as portrayed in this article. For some reason they were all trying to stifle our yearn for learning. It will not be the major players in this game. It will not be NASA, Germany, Boeing, Siemens, General Electric, Samsung, Canon and Daimler. It will be the hackers, people with a thirst for learning. It is the hackers with open source projects that are making this a viable new opportunity.
The new kids on the block with their college degrees will be protecting their intellect while us hackers will be sharing and growing. Most of the files, the parts to be printed, used for 3D printing are still free on the internet. The plans for building the 3D printers are open source. You can buy the circuit boards from people that build them using open source specs. The software is open source. Even Autocad, a company that gained dominance in the CAD industry because we could bootleg their software, is giving away their 3D software for free, like 123D Design. How cool would it be to have a family portrait in the form of a bronze statuette? Or that of a pet?
Last weekend I visited Deezmaker in Pasadena just to see these 3D printers. I’m sold. There will be one in everyone’s home. They are no larger than a regular printer and they don’t smell as I had thought they would. These printers were all busily printing, so I asked the guy what he was printing. He said “more printers”.
Everyone will have a 3D printer in their home. It will be limited to plastic parts, but printshops will open up where you can print that statuette in bronze or a new tail light for 5 dollars. The tax man and those guys in China will be ticked.
I’ll be buying one next month for $500 from Solidoodle and it is a two month waiting period. At Deezmaker, he had a two head unit that could print in two colors for $1200.
The US prevailed in WWII by pushing mass production to the limits. We won because we out produced our foes. That capability was extended past the end of the war to create a middle class with access to wonders that previously had only been available to royalty. Television sets, microwave ovens, automobiles and such became available because mass production drove their prices down to a level that John Q. Public could afford. John could afford to buy these things because he had a good job working in industries that obeyed Henry Ford's dictum to pay his employees enough to buy his products.
Enter the 3-D printer, and our economy sinks to "Cottage Industry" where things are made one by one on the kitchen table. I'm assuming that there remains a store somewhere where one goes to buy the plastic and powdered metals to dump in the hopper but where do the "templates" come from? If you buy the electronic code for a toaster there is no "customizing" going on. If you give John Q. a workstation with a copy of Pro-E on it and expect him to generate the toaster design you are expecting an awful lot from today's public education system. John Q. Public's technological base is such that he has yet to change the spark-plug in his ten year old lawnmower and he has not changed the oil!
Do you expect the end user to become an engineer, designing his own toaster? He has to become proficient in 3-D modeling, strength of materials, finite element stress analysis, heat treating and surface coatings, &c. &c. In other words he needs an actual engineering degree to design real functional parts, not just plastic lookalikes.
Which brings up the question of who or where any post production processes are accomplished like heat treating, ion nitrating, electroplating, sputter deposition, plasma iondoping, and vacuum plasmaspraying, to name a few?
I'll stipulate that John might be a bright boy and figure it all out, but where does John work to earn his daily bread once manufacturing has become a cottage industry? Please don't say "Service Industries"! A service economy is based on the premise that we'll all get rich by taking in each others laundry. It hasn't worked yet...
Regards,
GtG
PS Wonder, how's that "cold fusion" thing working out? I haven't heard much lately...
Seriously?
No one would make software with customizable features?
Not one programer will give the customer the option of selecting colors, types of handles, number of slices, cord out the back or off the side, extra thick slices, or anything else a customer might want to add, like the family crest?
In Soviet Russia, maybe.
add me to the ping list, please.
CSI-Ny had a quaint episode about a 3D gun being printeed, but as susual it was something of more of a propaganda show harping upon the frail desin.
In the show they printed a snub nosed barreled .38 by the looks, cylinders and all, correct me if I am wrong but why a printed wheel gun?
Thats absurd when you could have simply made a double or even a four shot derringer with thicker barrels.
Actually a 3D printed Glock would have been easier I think.
I expect a massive anti 3D campaign to apper soon, regulation and of course registration.
3D printer regulation, especially mental health checks will have to be performed.
Its a crazy world out there and nothing to blame it on, or is there?
Welcome aboard!
This would be perfect for McDonalds. They could print the McRib out of a meat by-product printer year round instead of stamping them out seasonally.
Soon you’ll be able to do this at home. Yuk!
Not all industry/production will move to the "cottage". Obviously there will be a spectrum of products (and company sizes) that will span from the cottage desktop to the full-bore production plant. My company does custom instrumentation for specialized purposes, and we're doing quite nicely with small lots of very high intellectual content devices.
The software will likely be so far past "Pro-E" that it will have all that specialized intelligence built in. I mentioned that Roland MDX-40. No way can I write "g-code" to program a CNC system.....but I don't have to. All I need to do is produce a 3D CAD drawing, output it as STL, and the Roland "does it's thing". I expect future software to be developed in that direction, but "on steroids".
"Wonder, how's that "cold fusion" thing working out? I haven't heard much lately..."
Quite well, actually. There are four major players moving seriously toward a practical technology, and many others who are replicating the results of both Pons and Fleischmann and Arata. Mitsubishi and Toshiba have both announced controlled isotope production using a flux of deuterium atoms through a layered matrix of palladium and a target compound. Mitsubishi did the original work, and Toshiba replicated it. The reality of LENR is now undeniable by any honest scientist who studies the available data. Unfortunately, it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion of it here on FR, as any CF thread is swarmed by the pathological skeptic locusts.
The best summary of the CF story I found thus far is "Excess Heat" by George Beaudette. He covers both the science (in sufficient depth that us hard-core techies will benefit, but that the intelligent layman can understand) and the sociology and politics that have resulted in the current "media blackout" of the technology.
A Happy New year to you and yours.
Regards,
GtG
The only drawback to Beaudette's book is that it is somewhat out of date. I think it only covers up to 2002, so doesn't have all the latest "hot" (no pun intended) news. But it is very sufficient to cover the needed "science proof" (experimental details of original experiments and replications of same).
"A Happy New year to you and yours."
Many thanks.....and the same to you and yours.
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