10 ms·

MakerBot's bold bet that 3D printers would become common

h4nkoslo 10y ago
3D printing is inherently limited by what you can do with plastics (until you start getting into laser sintering or something else exotic). The niche application ends up being Yoda figurines and etc that require weird shapes and high detail. For my money, cheap & modular mills like those at http://carbide3d.com/ http://carbide3d.com/ are much more promising because you can actually make structural components. A $500 CNC'd Grizzly mill equivalent (hell, probably $1000 if it was user friendly enough) would be extremely useful and would sell like hotcakes, but of course that's empirically extremely difficult to design since mills are a mature technology that requires things like calibration, knowledge of tools and materials to use, etc. Even their $1100 machine would probably be fun as hell, but it's a price point that actually requires a use in mind. Incidentally, as far as I can tell the most successful home-manufacturing product of the past 10 years or so has been https://ghostgunner.net/ https://ghostgunner.net/ .
- nabla9 10y ago
  I think the economic model of 3d printing in home is off. The goal should be to have advanced 3D printers, latches and CNC milling machine shops that provide easy to use services for walk-in customers or mail-orders. It should work just as easily as copying and printing services work for PDF files. You don't know if they have Xerox or Canon and you don't care. You want to know if they can print A1 and things like that. As 3D printing advances, having affordable access to several $20,000 - $200,000 specialized printers in your city beats the $2,000 printer in your home for a serious hobbyist or small business. Maybe its worth paying $200-$300 for printer you can use for prototypes before ordering more expensive work.
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    The problem with 3D printing / lathing / milling as a service is that particular parts can have orders of magnitude differences in machining costs, and typically you need humans in the loop to figure out if you're asking for something ridiculous (or dangerous, or harmful to the machine...) These guys are close to that model: https://www.plethora.com/ https://www.plethora.com/ . Their supposed killer advantage is that they have spent a lot of time deriving a cost model for arbitrary designs which allows relatively unsupervised submissions, but because they're very dependent on that cost model, the number of operations and customizations they support is fairly limited.
    - Gibbon1 10y ago
      That sounds like the PCB prototyping/short run production house model. Which makes more sense. As long as the cost isn't too high and the turn around time is short.
- azdle 10y ago
  I disagree. Yeah, it's plastics only, but that's not really that big of a limitation in my opinion. Now, I've printed a yoda or two (who hasn't?), but where it really shines for me is small things that need a little bit of precision to be good. And yes, I could use a CNC mill an create a lot of my parts and they'd be just as good, probably stronger. The problem is that I live in a studio apartment. Since I don't have a workshop and I don't want to drive to a hackerspace when I want to make something, I'm going to choose not to subject my girlfriend (and preferably not myself) to to the mess and noise of a mill. Plus a printer is so much easier in my experience, I don't need to worry about setting feed rates or replacing bits, I can just click print and go watch TV while it prints. I'll admit there are things that I can't do that I could do with a mill (I would really like to be able to mill circuit boards), but at least to me a printer makes much more sense for the vast majority of lazy stupid people like me.
  - jordanb 10y ago
    Machining plastic on a small tabletop machine isn't very noisy. And it's a lot less messy too since it doesn't involve any liquid chemicals or fumes, you just have the chips.
- jordanb 10y ago
  Sherline has been selling small mills and lathes to the hobbyist machinist market for many years for about the price you're quoting.
willholloway 10y ago
3D FDM plastic printers are an useful component of the future the hype described, but they are just a component, they are not energy to matter Star Trek replicators. If one designs for it, it is possible to build complex products. FarmBot is a good example. It is made with a combination of 3D FDM printed parts, flat metal parts that could be made with a plasma cutter or CNC, open source software and compute provided by small ARM computers, and commodity produced parts like wires, motors and extruded aluminium rails. Thats how RepRaps are made, and that is how you have to build in this new way. Very few things are solid plastic shapes. 3D FDM printers are great for designing and producing the case that your etched PCB, switches and LED's attach to. It is an ingredient in the recipe. FDM can be used to make custom metal components through green sandcasting metals. If more projects were designed like RepRap, or FarmBot, this new industrial revolution could still take shape. Robotic PCB production is another key ingredient that is needed for reality to match up to the hype.
- jokoon 10y ago
  Yes, until people realize you can't make everything with plastic and that you need metals, maybe 3D printing with go somewhere. Not to forget than certain steel parts might not even be accessible to mere mortals, either because certain steel require certain things. I'm not against fixing your dishwasher with some plastic part, but that's far from a revolution. And it's not like industry won't fight it either.
  - jordanb 10y ago
    You can't even print composites. Seriously, most 3d printing fanboys I've met couldn't even begin to define the term "tensile strength". I had one guy insist that his 3d printer could 3d print wood. I said there's no way, so the next day he brought in an object made out of ABS with wood flower suspended in it. He literally couldn't comprehend how that differs from a real wood object, structurally, or even better how it'd differ from a cold-molded composite wood object.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
icantdrive55 10y ago
Just give 3-D printing time. I really hate it when people right off good--no promising--technology. Just wait? Then again, I thought the Internet would encourage people to ticker/rebuild their gizmos. I'm loosing that battle. "Just throw it away!" That attitude kills me. Plus, I don't have the disposable income to think like that. (Actually a lot of people are repairing things, building things. Part of the problem is propriatiatry repair manuals.) I truly believe when 3-D printers extrude metal, they will ,hopefully, be in most garages. (Cheap printers that extrude metal. Metal equal to, or stronger that cast metal.)
sytelus 10y ago
I'm guilty as charged. I predicted in 2014 that within 3 years majority of upper middle class households will have 3D printer just like they have paper printer. Boy, I was wrong and it feels quite laughable claim now. After initial hype of continuous reduction of prices, things have just came to halt. Most people don't want to spend few hundred dollars just to build lifeless models of dragons and there has been no killer application that can justify the price.
- Animats 10y ago
  I've heard the CEO of Autodesk, Carl Bass, saying the same thing. That's why Autodesk came out with all those low-end 3D tools.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  I made a similar claim but said 10-15 years, which I still think is about right.
- kylec 10y ago
  I predicted in 2014 that within 3 years majority of upper middle class households will have 3D printer just like they have paper printer. I don't have a paper printer anymore, and I wonder how many households still do. I'd wager that more households got rid of their paper printers in the past 3 years than bought 3D printers.
  - sytelus 10y ago
    I also don't use paper printer more than may be 5 times a year. But those 5 times are important times and these things are cheap enough for the convenience of not have to travel to some shop with USB.
- stevewilhelm 10y ago
  Comments from four years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640988#5641367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640988#5641367 I own a 2D printer and have found my use of it declined dramatically over the last five years. Given I just became a Google Shopping Express member and I am already addicted to Amazon Prime, I anticipate my desire to make my own 3D items at home to also decline over time. I do agree with @JDDunn9. There will be businesses that will provide 3D printing services using state of the art printers, high quality materials, and their expertise. Bay Photo is a 2D example of this kind of service. They will deliver the results quickly, cheaply, and reliably using distribution services like Prime and Express. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594997#4595489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594997#4595489 I'll buy a 3D printer when I can print all the pieces to build a Nerf N-Strike Elite Hail Fire for under forty dollars worth of materials and it can be printed and assembled in under three hours. I picked this item because it was featured in the Wired magazine article right after their "3D printers are the next PC" article. ~
cooper12 10y ago
> The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.” I find this to be a strange statement when the previous paragraph talked about a class-action lawsuit due to a faulty extruder. Is it an unrealistic expectation now to expect your thousand-dollar 3D printer to Just Work? You can't just promise someone the future and then backtrack when people hold you to it.
wfunction 10y ago
I'm glad someone finally said it. I don't have a particular habit of predicting things correctly, but in this case I really couldn't see what the point of a 3D printer was. Even when I was given free access to one I had no idea what I would ever want to build.
visarga 10y ago
Cars and computers didn't take off for decades, but when they did, they really revolutionized the world. We aren't even at the Ford Model T stage with 3D printing.
Taek 10y ago
It's just too early. I think we will see a 3D printing revolution but you need to be able to do useful stuff with the printers. A good use case would be anything that's usually mass produced but actually benefits from high customization. Like clothes. If you could 3D print clothes, you might have a market. Or cables (electrical, Ethernet, etc.) that are an exact length. Or perhaps things like toothbrushes, or contact lenses. The technology isn't very close to that yet. But if it keeps improving, there's a good chance that we really will end up with a 3D printer in every home.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- danmaz74 10y ago
  Ethernet cables and (quality) clothes have to be assembled, not printed. And you need very specific materials to start with. Not realistic examples imho.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  There are sewing robots. I don't know if they go as far as cutting the fabric for themselves.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Well, there would be a revolution if you could buy a robot that would take fabric and a CAD design as input, and gave you ready-to-wear dress as an output. Without that, it's "meh, faster to go to a store" situation.
- analognoise 10y ago
  Cabling is actually serious business; from an electrical standpoint, there is impedance matching, delay matching, cable shielding for EMI/C, etc. Then the connector itself has a slew of mechanical requirements: mate/demate cycles, tolerances, thermal. Then it all needs to be made for a reasonable price - there are entire groups of engineers that band together to produce specifications so that things like Ethernet cables can exist and give the performance that people need, while being interoperable.
gfosco 10y ago
My wife and I have a Type A Machines Series 1 Pro and use it often. It prints like every kind of filament, including wood and metal filled. We've done several cool projects and are constantly on the lookout for the next creation. Next up we're looking at fabric printers.
azdle 10y ago
For anyone who stops half way thinking this is some comeback of the marketing of makerbot, keep reading. Overall it's a fair summary of what happened in the world of makerbot. As someone who was listening when makerbot was just starting up, I think that Makerbot as a company both did 3D printing a great service and a great disservice. Without makerbot it's entirely possible that without makerbot making as big of a splash as they did and without the press that they were able to create 3d printing wouldn't have taken off like it did. Unfortunately the disservices that they then did to the 3d printing community had so much more of an impact because of all that press that was primarily focused on them and equating '3d printer' to mean 'makerbot'. All that said, I'll never give up my 3D printers. For me it was still a revolution, I think I just had a lower bar for what it needed to be to be a revolution.
iamgopal 10y ago
The problem with 3D Printer is, it is no match to the existing manufacturing technologies. Imagine, the sub micron accuracy of iPhone, which in no way achievable with current 3D printing technology. The technology in to which 3D printer can really revolutionize the world right now is Electric Motor. ( Here I have said it, please don't patent it. :P ) I am actually doing it. If interested, drop me a mail. :)
- djsumdog 10y ago
  They are meant as prototyping tools, and some do quite well beyond that. The trouble is, we can't 3D print PCBs .. not safely anyway. There are quite a few more toxic chemicals to deal with, not to mention the complexities you'd run into trying to make multi-layer boards. Also I think people forgot plastic still cost money.
  - jordanb 10y ago
    That's not how they were being hyped a few years ago. Everyone was talking about machines building themselves and "everything factories" sitting in people's garages. I just sat there and thought "they finally managed to invent an automated manufacturing process that's even more slow and expensive than machining."
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    They make PCB etching lasers, just FYI. So the real problems are in more than 2 layers (since cameras and marks/holes can align both sides of a 2-layer board). The lasers, as you'd guess, are for prototyping and a few specialty purposes. Check out LPKF[1] for all kinds of neat toys. [1] http://www.lpkfusa.com http://www.lpkfusa.com
- jolhoeft 10y ago
  I'm curious how you are using 3-D printing for an electric motor. Most of the key components, steel laminations, copper windings, magnets, commutator and brushes (if you are going old school :-) ) don't lend themselves to 3-D printing. I just see some mounting hardware being usefully printed.
wanderingjew 10y ago
This gets the current state of 3D printers half right. I wrote the same thing seven months ago http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/ http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/, and yes, the downfall of Makerbot was due to going closed source and shipping faulty 'smart' extruders. However, the author gets it completely wrong by not looking at any of the other companies shipping reprap designs. https://www.lulzbot.com/ https://www.lulzbot.com/ has seen consistent yearly growth, from tens of thousands a month when the first MakerBots came out to tens of millions per month today. http://prusaprinters.org/ http://prusaprinters.org/ is experiencing the same growth, and that's despite an obscene number of clones of their machine on the market. The growth of 3D printing never stopped. If you look at the well-respected companies in the field, they're seeing consistent, increasing revenue. The trouble with the industry is Makerbot. They burned their community with the change to closed source, they killed their industrial/educational market with the Smart Extruder problems, but they were the darling of the media. When Makerbot laid off employees, it made headlines. When manufacturing was outsourced to China, tech bloggers stumbled over themselves to get a post out. As Makerbot went south, so went the perception of the industry. 3D printing is still a growing industry, and the tech in low-end printers is getting really, really good. It'll never be a printer on every desk, but if you find a household with a circular saw or a soldering iron, you'll probably also find a 3D printer. That's what it should be, anyway: a tool, and not a fetishized technology.
- desireco42 10y ago
  I think the main issue is that there is no killer app. Anything that would make me want to buy one. Once that is figured out, everything else will fall into place.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    How about Henry Segerman’s math sculptures? https://amzn.com/142142035X https://amzn.com/142142035X (Or you could just have Shapeways do the printing.)
    - sdenton4 10y ago
partycoder 10y ago
I think it is similar to what happened to AI in the so called "AI winter", where professionals, consumers, companies and funding in general walked away from AI for quite some time. We do know that for sure 3D printing will make a comeback for good one day, probably one decade in the future.
- detaro 10y ago
  I'm not sure that is comparable. 3D printing isn't dead in professional use, research is still happening, has an active hobbyist community, ... it's just the "3D printer in every home" idea that Makerbot and others tried to peddle that's not happening.
hyperopia 10y ago
Top highlight on this: > Writing on Brokelyn.com, former employee Isaac Anderson placed the blame for those three machines’ problems squarely on MakerBot’s decision to go closed source. They could no longer rely on their old customer base of “capable hobbyists who provided tech-savvy feedback and suggestions for improvement.” The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.”
Tempest1981 10y ago
At the Maker faire this summer, Almost half of the largest building was 3D printer displays. Not much variety. Personally, I found the old displays that were more electronics-based more interesting – more variety.
AbrahamParangi 10y ago
The author is wrong- but it's not their fault. All the interesting things (new technologies) in 3D printing today are happening at an enterprise price scale right now so if you're not looking too hard, it can be hard to see. Today 3D printing is eating small-batch manufacturing. Tomorrow any production run of less than 5000 units will happen on 3D printers. Bre Pettis and the maker (and investment) community had the right ideas about the future, but I believe Makerbot focused too much on how to sell a hot glue gun (with extra steps) to the public and far too little on how to make a product that was truly useful to their customers. (disclaimer: I work here https://markforged.com https://markforged.com, we're hiring)
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  I visited a 3d printing center a few weeks ago. The guy was extremely busy printing all sorts of products for hospitals and medical labs. The occasional comicon type stuff came in, but a huge demand for b2b 3d printing.
  - grogenaut 10y ago
    What type of printers was he using?
    - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
      They had over 20 different ones, but I do remember seeing some by 3d systems. Did not see any makerbots.
      - grogenaut 10y ago
        I meant were they doing the more advanced printing methods like a stratasys or the light based ones or the simple extruder type ones? Or TI sintering or what?
        IndianAstronaut 10y ago
Animats 10y ago
Makerbot's big problem was that their machine sucks. Low-end 3D printers just aren't very good. The weld bonds between layers of ABS filaments are too weak, and the objects break easily. They often break during building, just due to thermal expansion. 3D printing requires better temperature control of the process than Makerbot ever achieved. TechShop used to have some MakerBots, but they've been replaced by better machines. Materials costs are too high, though; the Form I and Form II use a working fluid that costs $130/liter. (This is a bit like the inkjet printer ink problem.) They also go through build tanks fairly fast; the working fluid in its solid form builds up at the bottom. But the build quality is excellent. The "maker revolution", such as it is, is driven by laser cutters. They're accurate, fast, reliable, work on large sheets, and have no consumables. The Next Big Thing is supposed to be desktop waterjet cutters. The Wazer, though, is apparently very slow, and may use more garnet per cut than the big waterjets. Wazer also glosses over the problem that waterjets generate a sludge composed of water, shattered garnet, and whatever you're cutting. You have to pay to get rid of that stuff. Waterjet cutting is a good industrial process, but not office-ready. (On a vaguely related note for maker types: does anyone know of a good low-cost surface mount reflow oven? The common low-end T962 has a big hot spot in the middle of the heating area and will scorch boards when used at lead-free solder temperatures. Yes, there are fixes, but I want something that works out of the box.)
- devoply 10y ago
  Give it another 10 years. These sort of things often tend to require upgrade in tech to become actually successful. It will be huge one day soon, just not right now. The idea is sound, it's just the tech and the execution is missing.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Well, how do you measure "successful"? I mean, welding machines are pretty damn useful and they're definitely successful tech. Yet you don't exactly see one in every home. Part of 3D printing's "success problem" IMO is that people started using a hopelessly ambitious definition of success.
- 10y ago
disposablezero 10y ago
Makerbot was a Model A: clunky, slow, power-hungry and limited to all but geeks; it is certainly a lot cheaper for a hobbyist than buying a Stratasys the size of a large refrigerator and costing as much as a small home. To have distributed manufacturing, a much faster, higher capacity, more energy efficient, more flexible (more materials, deposition/removal methods), easy-to-use/-monetize/-protect IP machine/front-end would need to happen to be practical to do more than prototyping. Amazon could pull this off and save on 'round-the-world shipping by becoming more of an IP to end-user fulfillment marketplace instead of a warehouse logistics shop. (for products which can be built JIT from standard parts/materials)
Blahah 10y ago
Home 3D printing is not worth it for most people in the developed world, but in developing countries it can be. When I lived in the UK, I would default to trying to 3D print anything I needed around the house. But manufacturing is cheap enough, and availability of products so ubiquitous in the UK, that it was almost always cheaper to just buy the thing on Amazon instead of print it. The only thing I printed that I couldn't have bought cheaply was custom plumbing parts. Now I've moved to Kenya where Amazon doesn't deliver, import duty is extremely high, and availability of low throughput items is non-existent. I 3D print everything from spare parts for my truck to basic DIY supplies like rawl plugs and cable tidies - things I just cant get cheaply. Of course the fact that 3D printing is so useful in this environment is offset by the fact that hardly anyone here can afford it. I'm planning to set up a community makespace where people can print cheaply, but I don't expect it to cause a revolution.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Oh wow that's really interesting. What brought you to Kenya? (I'm also an expat living abroad.)
  - Blahah 10y ago
    My wife and I were both coming to the end of our PhDs and knew we didn't want to continue in academia. We have a successful software consultancy on the side, and have been teaching bioinformatics around Africa for a couple of years. We came to Kenya for the summer, then realised we had a much higher quality of life here, our work had much greater potential impact, and there was nothing stopping us from staying. So we stayed :D
westoncb 10y ago
Reading the comments, it seems like the main thing missing here is multi-material 3d printing. Yes, there's no killer application for just printing plastic, but checkout, e.g., http://www.voxel8.com/ http://www.voxel8.com/
stevewilhelm 10y ago
Where is the companion piece "The Bitcoin Revolution that Wasn't?"
vacuumator 10y ago
The propaganda echo chamber apparatus killed 3D printing in the womb, when they started harping on bullshit about 3D printed guns. Almost zero nerds gave half a shit about printing guns. Like, at all. But news, news, news sites had a story to sell, right around the time of the Silk Road takedown, and poof, nerds received a message, which, in the context of other dubious criminal prosecutions, communicated that an alphabet agency might just destroy you and ruin your life because some abiguous technical detail made for an easy target. Pirating music and movies, becomes a child pornography felony. Trading in bit coins becomes a Silk Road drug bust. 3D printing becomes weapons possessions with mandatory minimums. Message received, propaganda apparatus. Risk total ruin, by buying a 3D printer. Got it. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Move right along.
- atemerev 10y ago
  What's the point of 3D printing a bad gun in a country where in some states you can go to Walmart and buy a nice gun there, for a fraction of a cost? And it's not like you could 3D print ammo.
personjerry 10y ago
I think that we hackers tend to focus on tech-oriented looks at why things succeed or fail. I propose another idea: that we need education of 3D modeling in schools, at a basic level, in order to encourage more people to understand the possibilities. In middle school we'd learn various things about art, art history, art techniques, and while they weren't comprehensive, they provided a basic level of appreciation for art. As an example, if I hadn't learned about techniques like shading or perspective drawing, I would've thought that they were impossible for a layman like me to attempt. For most people (and by "most people" I mean anecdotally most people I know), 3d modeling and 3d printing seems to be at this unapproachable level of complexity. If we can show kids the simpler side of 3d modeling, there would be a much greater consumer interest in 3d printing.
- analognoise 10y ago
  I'd rather have logic taught in schools before we waste time with 3D printing. We need to help people develop their natural bullshit filters so that fake news, advertising, and rhetoric have less impact.
  - rmelly 10y ago
    Unfortunately, I don't think teaching logic will get you what you want here. Fake news may be false, bit it is often (mostly) logically consistent - this is part of the power.
- gregpilling 10y ago
  My kids is in 4th grade, and he has an engineering class. They sketch with pencil in isometric view, but this is good prep for using CAD.
patrickg_zill 10y ago
So at Tinkermill.org in Longmont CO, where I am a member, we have 3d printing machines. We also have a good machine shop, and some of the members got together and refurbished an old injection molding machine. So, we can 3d print a test, then can transform the finished design into instructions for the CNC machine, to produce a mold which goes into the injection molding machine. So far no one has used this to prototype a part that started a business, but that is a great way to use a 3d printer, as a first run prototype which can then be used for other manufacturing. A guy who is designing a game used both the 3d printer and laser cutter to make his prototype board and pieces. We also have a few whizzes who have whipped up replacement parts and e.g. hose adapters for the dust collector in the woodshop. Overall 3d printing is like the early days of the commercial Internet: people intuitively knew it was changing things, but had only scattered anecdotes as proof.
jakozaur 10y ago
By the way, which 3d Printer would you recommend for hobby use case? 1. Prefer plug and play, interested in making stuff not debugging 3d printers. Probably that exclude most of cheap 3d printers. 2. Hobby, so likely will go with FDM instead of SLA. FDM seems cheaper, faster and more materials for just a little precision loss. 3. Zortrax M200 (https://zortrax.com/ https://zortrax.com/) seems to be the best option. Any other suggestions?
legodt 10y ago
3d printing might not have had the huge impact expected for it in the consumer world, but in the professional world printing is hugely important. Getting a physical model of your cad file overnight from a black box at your desk or in your model shop is a workflow game changer. Make an ergonomic change to your grip? Test it out almost immediately. Manufacturer needs you to change the draft on your shell? Print it first before sending it out and make sure everything still fits. When previously you had to make engineering accuracy models all day in the shop or get a part made by a small run manufacturer, now prototyping and testing variations from cad can all be done in house. Consumers might not be directly benefiting from the advent of democratized 3d printers, but they are benefiting in the gains of efficiency at the firms designing their goods
erikb 10y ago
Oh, that was a painful read. Repeatedly they mentioned that all development to this point wasn't able to provide a cheap enough solution for the common user. And if you ever had a 3d printed piece in your hand you also know that the desktop printers still are not detailed and flexible enough. So in end effect the current status doesn't proof at all that there is not a market, just that the technology can't reach market yet.
erikb 10y ago
"Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it." Can anybody explain how that should work out? Usually people laugh about someone who only pretends.
- abraae 10y ago
  Pretty funny given recent events.
snarfy 10y ago
It's a useful tool for engineers, but not everybody is an engineer. It was hyped like it was a replicator from star trek. The novelty of printing little plastic figurines wears off quickly. At some point you realize that you can buy a bag of a much higher quality injection molded version of the same thing at the dollar store. They are useful for making things that don't yet exist, but that means it must be something you come up with and model yourself. And this is where they are no longer the tool of users, only engineers.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I just got a MonoPrice Select Mini a few weeks ago for $200, and spent about $30 on upgrades for it (an e3d hotend, the rest of the upgrades I printed myself), and about $80 on 4 1kg spools of filament. It's really great, I'm loving it so far. Been making my own things with OpenSCAD too, and some of my friends have been making things with SketchUp for me to print.
matthewhall 10y ago
Jeez now I realize why the maker bit at my school is never used and the $600 replicator 2 clones are
blhack 10y ago
From what I've heard/read, this is the best ~$1000 printer available right now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017IZBFB2/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2RRCDXZXQJUJ7&coliid=I8VCNVXQ3AOND https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017IZBFB2/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_tt... (There seems to be some curiosity in this thread about what printer you should get)
ideonexus 10y ago
3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up. The 3D printing community, like some coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity. In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.
- leke 10y ago
  It sounds a bit like we are at the stage when computers were using punch cards. Maybe in a decade or two, things will get a bit more interesting. I was thinking of getting a cheap 3D printer for Christmas, but will probably put it off now I realise it's not, as you say, pulg'n'play.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    It sounds a bit like we are at the stage when computers were using punch cards. Maybe in a decade or two, things will get a bit more interesting. Agreed. MakerBot in 2012 was like trying to start Apple in 1962. What kind of personal computer could one build from the era's transistors and magnetic core memory? That primitive thing could have sparked someone's imagination, but it wouldn't have had any mass-market applications. 3D printing's Apple moment is still waiting for its equivalent of the integrated circuit (a technological enabler) followed by a VisiCalc (a killer application).

3D printing is inherently limited by what you can do with plastics (until you start getting into laser sintering or something else exotic). The niche application ends up being Yoda figurines and etc that require weird shapes and high detail. For my money, cheap & modular mills like those at http://carbide3d.com/ http://carbide3d.com/ are much more promising because you can actually make structural components. A $500 CNC'd Grizzly mill equivalent (hell, probably $1000 if it was user friendly enough) would be extremely useful and would sell like hotcakes, but of course that's empirically extremely difficult to design since mills are a mature technology that requires things like calibration, knowledge of tools and materials to use, etc. Even their $1100 machine would probably be fun as hell, but it's a price point that actually requires a use in mind. Incidentally, as far as I can tell the most successful home-manufacturing product of the past 10 years or so has been https://ghostgunner.net/ https://ghostgunner.net/ .

nabla9 10y ago
I think the economic model of 3d printing in home is off. The goal should be to have advanced 3D printers, latches and CNC milling machine shops that provide easy to use services for walk-in customers or mail-orders. It should work just as easily as copying and printing services work for PDF files. You don't know if they have Xerox or Canon and you don't care. You want to know if they can print A1 and things like that. As 3D printing advances, having affordable access to several $20,000 - $200,000 specialized printers in your city beats the $2,000 printer in your home for a serious hobbyist or small business. Maybe its worth paying $200-$300 for printer you can use for prototypes before ordering more expensive work.
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  The problem with 3D printing / lathing / milling as a service is that particular parts can have orders of magnitude differences in machining costs, and typically you need humans in the loop to figure out if you're asking for something ridiculous (or dangerous, or harmful to the machine...) These guys are close to that model: https://www.plethora.com/ https://www.plethora.com/ . Their supposed killer advantage is that they have spent a lot of time deriving a cost model for arbitrary designs which allows relatively unsupervised submissions, but because they're very dependent on that cost model, the number of operations and customizations they support is fairly limited.
  - Gibbon1 10y ago
    That sounds like the PCB prototyping/short run production house model. Which makes more sense. As long as the cost isn't too high and the turn around time is short.
azdle 10y ago
I disagree. Yeah, it's plastics only, but that's not really that big of a limitation in my opinion. Now, I've printed a yoda or two (who hasn't?), but where it really shines for me is small things that need a little bit of precision to be good. And yes, I could use a CNC mill an create a lot of my parts and they'd be just as good, probably stronger. The problem is that I live in a studio apartment. Since I don't have a workshop and I don't want to drive to a hackerspace when I want to make something, I'm going to choose not to subject my girlfriend (and preferably not myself) to to the mess and noise of a mill. Plus a printer is so much easier in my experience, I don't need to worry about setting feed rates or replacing bits, I can just click print and go watch TV while it prints. I'll admit there are things that I can't do that I could do with a mill (I would really like to be able to mill circuit boards), but at least to me a printer makes much more sense for the vast majority of lazy stupid people like me.
- jordanb 10y ago
  Machining plastic on a small tabletop machine isn't very noisy. And it's a lot less messy too since it doesn't involve any liquid chemicals or fumes, you just have the chips.
jordanb 10y ago
Sherline has been selling small mills and lathes to the hobbyist machinist market for many years for about the price you're quoting.

willholloway 10y ago

3D FDM plastic printers are an useful component of the future the hype described, but they are just a component, they are not energy to matter Star Trek replicators. If one designs for it, it is possible to build complex products. FarmBot is a good example. It is made with a combination of 3D FDM printed parts, flat metal parts that could be made with a plasma cutter or CNC, open source software and compute provided by small ARM computers, and commodity produced parts like wires, motors and extruded aluminium rails. Thats how RepRaps are made, and that is how you have to build in this new way. Very few things are solid plastic shapes. 3D FDM printers are great for designing and producing the case that your etched PCB, switches and LED's attach to. It is an ingredient in the recipe. FDM can be used to make custom metal components through green sandcasting metals. If more projects were designed like RepRap, or FarmBot, this new industrial revolution could still take shape. Robotic PCB production is another key ingredient that is needed for reality to match up to the hype.

jokoon 10y ago
Yes, until people realize you can't make everything with plastic and that you need metals, maybe 3D printing with go somewhere. Not to forget than certain steel parts might not even be accessible to mere mortals, either because certain steel require certain things. I'm not against fixing your dishwasher with some plastic part, but that's far from a revolution. And it's not like industry won't fight it either.
- jordanb 10y ago
  You can't even print composites. Seriously, most 3d printing fanboys I've met couldn't even begin to define the term "tensile strength". I had one guy insist that his 3d printer could 3d print wood. I said there's no way, so the next day he brought in an object made out of ABS with wood flower suspended in it. He literally couldn't comprehend how that differs from a real wood object, structurally, or even better how it'd differ from a cold-molded composite wood object.
  - jacobolus 10y ago

icantdrive55 10y ago

Just give 3-D printing time. I really hate it when people right off good--no promising--technology. Just wait? Then again, I thought the Internet would encourage people to ticker/rebuild their gizmos. I'm loosing that battle. "Just throw it away!" That attitude kills me. Plus, I don't have the disposable income to think like that. (Actually a lot of people are repairing things, building things. Part of the problem is propriatiatry repair manuals.) I truly believe when 3-D printers extrude metal, they will ,hopefully, be in most garages. (Cheap printers that extrude metal. Metal equal to, or stronger that cast metal.)

sytelus 10y ago

I'm guilty as charged. I predicted in 2014 that within 3 years majority of upper middle class households will have 3D printer just like they have paper printer. Boy, I was wrong and it feels quite laughable claim now. After initial hype of continuous reduction of prices, things have just came to halt. Most people don't want to spend few hundred dollars just to build lifeless models of dragons and there has been no killer application that can justify the price.

Animats 10y ago
I've heard the CEO of Autodesk, Carl Bass, saying the same thing. That's why Autodesk came out with all those low-end 3D tools.
abritinthebay 10y ago
I made a similar claim but said 10-15 years, which I still think is about right.
kylec 10y ago
I predicted in 2014 that within 3 years majority of upper middle class households will have 3D printer just like they have paper printer. I don't have a paper printer anymore, and I wonder how many households still do. I'd wager that more households got rid of their paper printers in the past 3 years than bought 3D printers.
- sytelus 10y ago
  I also don't use paper printer more than may be 5 times a year. But those 5 times are important times and these things are cheap enough for the convenience of not have to travel to some shop with USB.
stevewilhelm 10y ago
Comments from four years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640988#5641367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640988#5641367 I own a 2D printer and have found my use of it declined dramatically over the last five years. Given I just became a Google Shopping Express member and I am already addicted to Amazon Prime, I anticipate my desire to make my own 3D items at home to also decline over time. I do agree with @JDDunn9. There will be businesses that will provide 3D printing services using state of the art printers, high quality materials, and their expertise. Bay Photo is a 2D example of this kind of service. They will deliver the results quickly, cheaply, and reliably using distribution services like Prime and Express. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594997#4595489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594997#4595489 I'll buy a 3D printer when I can print all the pieces to build a Nerf N-Strike Elite Hail Fire for under forty dollars worth of materials and it can be printed and assembled in under three hours. I picked this item because it was featured in the Wired magazine article right after their "3D printers are the next PC" article. ~

cooper12 10y ago

> The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.” I find this to be a strange statement when the previous paragraph talked about a class-action lawsuit due to a faulty extruder. Is it an unrealistic expectation now to expect your thousand-dollar 3D printer to Just Work? You can't just promise someone the future and then backtrack when people hold you to it.

wfunction 10y ago

I'm glad someone finally said it. I don't have a particular habit of predicting things correctly, but in this case I really couldn't see what the point of a 3D printer was. Even when I was given free access to one I had no idea what I would ever want to build.

visarga 10y ago

Cars and computers didn't take off for decades, but when they did, they really revolutionized the world. We aren't even at the Ford Model T stage with 3D printing.

Taek 10y ago

It's just too early. I think we will see a 3D printing revolution but you need to be able to do useful stuff with the printers. A good use case would be anything that's usually mass produced but actually benefits from high customization. Like clothes. If you could 3D print clothes, you might have a market. Or cables (electrical, Ethernet, etc.) that are an exact length. Or perhaps things like toothbrushes, or contact lenses. The technology isn't very close to that yet. But if it keeps improving, there's a good chance that we really will end up with a 3D printer in every home.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
danmaz74 10y ago
Ethernet cables and (quality) clothes have to be assembled, not printed. And you need very specific materials to start with. Not realistic examples imho.
andrewflnr 10y ago
There are sewing robots. I don't know if they go as far as cutting the fabric for themselves.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Well, there would be a revolution if you could buy a robot that would take fabric and a CAD design as input, and gave you ready-to-wear dress as an output. Without that, it's "meh, faster to go to a store" situation.
analognoise 10y ago
Cabling is actually serious business; from an electrical standpoint, there is impedance matching, delay matching, cable shielding for EMI/C, etc. Then the connector itself has a slew of mechanical requirements: mate/demate cycles, tolerances, thermal. Then it all needs to be made for a reasonable price - there are entire groups of engineers that band together to produce specifications so that things like Ethernet cables can exist and give the performance that people need, while being interoperable.

gfosco 10y ago

My wife and I have a Type A Machines Series 1 Pro and use it often. It prints like every kind of filament, including wood and metal filled. We've done several cool projects and are constantly on the lookout for the next creation. Next up we're looking at fabric printers.

azdle 10y ago

For anyone who stops half way thinking this is some comeback of the marketing of makerbot, keep reading. Overall it's a fair summary of what happened in the world of makerbot. As someone who was listening when makerbot was just starting up, I think that Makerbot as a company both did 3D printing a great service and a great disservice. Without makerbot it's entirely possible that without makerbot making as big of a splash as they did and without the press that they were able to create 3d printing wouldn't have taken off like it did. Unfortunately the disservices that they then did to the 3d printing community had so much more of an impact because of all that press that was primarily focused on them and equating '3d printer' to mean 'makerbot'. All that said, I'll never give up my 3D printers. For me it was still a revolution, I think I just had a lower bar for what it needed to be to be a revolution.

iamgopal 10y ago

The problem with 3D Printer is, it is no match to the existing manufacturing technologies. Imagine, the sub micron accuracy of iPhone, which in no way achievable with current 3D printing technology. The technology in to which 3D printer can really revolutionize the world right now is Electric Motor. ( Here I have said it, please don't patent it. :P ) I am actually doing it. If interested, drop me a mail. :)

djsumdog 10y ago
They are meant as prototyping tools, and some do quite well beyond that. The trouble is, we can't 3D print PCBs .. not safely anyway. There are quite a few more toxic chemicals to deal with, not to mention the complexities you'd run into trying to make multi-layer boards. Also I think people forgot plastic still cost money.
- jordanb 10y ago
  That's not how they were being hyped a few years ago. Everyone was talking about machines building themselves and "everything factories" sitting in people's garages. I just sat there and thought "they finally managed to invent an automated manufacturing process that's even more slow and expensive than machining."
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  They make PCB etching lasers, just FYI. So the real problems are in more than 2 layers (since cameras and marks/holes can align both sides of a 2-layer board). The lasers, as you'd guess, are for prototyping and a few specialty purposes. Check out LPKF[1] for all kinds of neat toys. [1] http://www.lpkfusa.com http://www.lpkfusa.com
jolhoeft 10y ago
I'm curious how you are using 3-D printing for an electric motor. Most of the key components, steel laminations, copper windings, magnets, commutator and brushes (if you are going old school :-) ) don't lend themselves to 3-D printing. I just see some mounting hardware being usefully printed.

wanderingjew 10y ago

This gets the current state of 3D printers half right. I wrote the same thing seven months ago http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/ http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/, and yes, the downfall of Makerbot was due to going closed source and shipping faulty 'smart' extruders. However, the author gets it completely wrong by not looking at any of the other companies shipping reprap designs. https://www.lulzbot.com/ https://www.lulzbot.com/ has seen consistent yearly growth, from tens of thousands a month when the first MakerBots came out to tens of millions per month today. http://prusaprinters.org/ http://prusaprinters.org/ is experiencing the same growth, and that's despite an obscene number of clones of their machine on the market. The growth of 3D printing never stopped. If you look at the well-respected companies in the field, they're seeing consistent, increasing revenue. The trouble with the industry is Makerbot. They burned their community with the change to closed source, they killed their industrial/educational market with the Smart Extruder problems, but they were the darling of the media. When Makerbot laid off employees, it made headlines. When manufacturing was outsourced to China, tech bloggers stumbled over themselves to get a post out. As Makerbot went south, so went the perception of the industry. 3D printing is still a growing industry, and the tech in low-end printers is getting really, really good. It'll never be a printer on every desk, but if you find a household with a circular saw or a soldering iron, you'll probably also find a 3D printer. That's what it should be, anyway: a tool, and not a fetishized technology.

desireco42 10y ago
I think the main issue is that there is no killer app. Anything that would make me want to buy one. Once that is figured out, everything else will fall into place.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  How about Henry Segerman’s math sculptures? https://amzn.com/142142035X https://amzn.com/142142035X (Or you could just have Shapeways do the printing.)
  - sdenton4 10y ago

partycoder 10y ago

I think it is similar to what happened to AI in the so called "AI winter", where professionals, consumers, companies and funding in general walked away from AI for quite some time. We do know that for sure 3D printing will make a comeback for good one day, probably one decade in the future.

detaro 10y ago
I'm not sure that is comparable. 3D printing isn't dead in professional use, research is still happening, has an active hobbyist community, ... it's just the "3D printer in every home" idea that Makerbot and others tried to peddle that's not happening.

hyperopia 10y ago

Top highlight on this: > Writing on Brokelyn.com, former employee Isaac Anderson placed the blame for those three machines’ problems squarely on MakerBot’s decision to go closed source. They could no longer rely on their old customer base of “capable hobbyists who provided tech-savvy feedback and suggestions for improvement.” The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.”

Tempest1981 10y ago

At the Maker faire this summer, Almost half of the largest building was 3D printer displays. Not much variety. Personally, I found the old displays that were more electronics-based more interesting – more variety.

AbrahamParangi 10y ago

The author is wrong- but it's not their fault. All the interesting things (new technologies) in 3D printing today are happening at an enterprise price scale right now so if you're not looking too hard, it can be hard to see. Today 3D printing is eating small-batch manufacturing. Tomorrow any production run of less than 5000 units will happen on 3D printers. Bre Pettis and the maker (and investment) community had the right ideas about the future, but I believe Makerbot focused too much on how to sell a hot glue gun (with extra steps) to the public and far too little on how to make a product that was truly useful to their customers. (disclaimer: I work here https://markforged.com https://markforged.com, we're hiring)

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
I visited a 3d printing center a few weeks ago. The guy was extremely busy printing all sorts of products for hospitals and medical labs. The occasional comicon type stuff came in, but a huge demand for b2b 3d printing.
- grogenaut 10y ago
  What type of printers was he using?
  - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
    They had over 20 different ones, but I do remember seeing some by 3d systems. Did not see any makerbots.
    - grogenaut 10y ago
      I meant were they doing the more advanced printing methods like a stratasys or the light based ones or the simple extruder type ones? Or TI sintering or what?
      - IndianAstronaut 10y ago

Animats 10y ago

Makerbot's big problem was that their machine sucks. Low-end 3D printers just aren't very good. The weld bonds between layers of ABS filaments are too weak, and the objects break easily. They often break during building, just due to thermal expansion. 3D printing requires better temperature control of the process than Makerbot ever achieved. TechShop used to have some MakerBots, but they've been replaced by better machines. Materials costs are too high, though; the Form I and Form II use a working fluid that costs $130/liter. (This is a bit like the inkjet printer ink problem.) They also go through build tanks fairly fast; the working fluid in its solid form builds up at the bottom. But the build quality is excellent. The "maker revolution", such as it is, is driven by laser cutters. They're accurate, fast, reliable, work on large sheets, and have no consumables. The Next Big Thing is supposed to be desktop waterjet cutters. The Wazer, though, is apparently very slow, and may use more garnet per cut than the big waterjets. Wazer also glosses over the problem that waterjets generate a sludge composed of water, shattered garnet, and whatever you're cutting. You have to pay to get rid of that stuff. Waterjet cutting is a good industrial process, but not office-ready. (On a vaguely related note for maker types: does anyone know of a good low-cost surface mount reflow oven? The common low-end T962 has a big hot spot in the middle of the heating area and will scorch boards when used at lead-free solder temperatures. Yes, there are fixes, but I want something that works out of the box.)

devoply 10y ago
Give it another 10 years. These sort of things often tend to require upgrade in tech to become actually successful. It will be huge one day soon, just not right now. The idea is sound, it's just the tech and the execution is missing.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Well, how do you measure "successful"? I mean, welding machines are pretty damn useful and they're definitely successful tech. Yet you don't exactly see one in every home. Part of 3D printing's "success problem" IMO is that people started using a hopelessly ambitious definition of success.
10y ago

disposablezero 10y ago

Makerbot was a Model A: clunky, slow, power-hungry and limited to all but geeks; it is certainly a lot cheaper for a hobbyist than buying a Stratasys the size of a large refrigerator and costing as much as a small home. To have distributed manufacturing, a much faster, higher capacity, more energy efficient, more flexible (more materials, deposition/removal methods), easy-to-use/-monetize/-protect IP machine/front-end would need to happen to be practical to do more than prototyping. Amazon could pull this off and save on 'round-the-world shipping by becoming more of an IP to end-user fulfillment marketplace instead of a warehouse logistics shop. (for products which can be built JIT from standard parts/materials)

Blahah 10y ago

Home 3D printing is not worth it for most people in the developed world, but in developing countries it can be. When I lived in the UK, I would default to trying to 3D print anything I needed around the house. But manufacturing is cheap enough, and availability of products so ubiquitous in the UK, that it was almost always cheaper to just buy the thing on Amazon instead of print it. The only thing I printed that I couldn't have bought cheaply was custom plumbing parts. Now I've moved to Kenya where Amazon doesn't deliver, import duty is extremely high, and availability of low throughput items is non-existent. I 3D print everything from spare parts for my truck to basic DIY supplies like rawl plugs and cable tidies - things I just cant get cheaply. Of course the fact that 3D printing is so useful in this environment is offset by the fact that hardly anyone here can afford it. I'm planning to set up a community makespace where people can print cheaply, but I don't expect it to cause a revolution.

kilroy123 10y ago
Oh wow that's really interesting. What brought you to Kenya? (I'm also an expat living abroad.)
- Blahah 10y ago
  My wife and I were both coming to the end of our PhDs and knew we didn't want to continue in academia. We have a successful software consultancy on the side, and have been teaching bioinformatics around Africa for a couple of years. We came to Kenya for the summer, then realised we had a much higher quality of life here, our work had much greater potential impact, and there was nothing stopping us from staying. So we stayed :D

westoncb 10y ago

Reading the comments, it seems like the main thing missing here is multi-material 3d printing. Yes, there's no killer application for just printing plastic, but checkout, e.g., http://www.voxel8.com/ http://www.voxel8.com/

stevewilhelm 10y ago

Where is the companion piece "The Bitcoin Revolution that Wasn't?"

vacuumator 10y ago

The propaganda echo chamber apparatus killed 3D printing in the womb, when they started harping on bullshit about 3D printed guns. Almost zero nerds gave half a shit about printing guns. Like, at all. But news, news, news sites had a story to sell, right around the time of the Silk Road takedown, and poof, nerds received a message, which, in the context of other dubious criminal prosecutions, communicated that an alphabet agency might just destroy you and ruin your life because some abiguous technical detail made for an easy target. Pirating music and movies, becomes a child pornography felony. Trading in bit coins becomes a Silk Road drug bust. 3D printing becomes weapons possessions with mandatory minimums. Message received, propaganda apparatus. Risk total ruin, by buying a 3D printer. Got it. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Move right along.

atemerev 10y ago
What's the point of 3D printing a bad gun in a country where in some states you can go to Walmart and buy a nice gun there, for a fraction of a cost? And it's not like you could 3D print ammo.

personjerry 10y ago

I think that we hackers tend to focus on tech-oriented looks at why things succeed or fail. I propose another idea: that we need education of 3D modeling in schools, at a basic level, in order to encourage more people to understand the possibilities. In middle school we'd learn various things about art, art history, art techniques, and while they weren't comprehensive, they provided a basic level of appreciation for art. As an example, if I hadn't learned about techniques like shading or perspective drawing, I would've thought that they were impossible for a layman like me to attempt. For most people (and by "most people" I mean anecdotally most people I know), 3d modeling and 3d printing seems to be at this unapproachable level of complexity. If we can show kids the simpler side of 3d modeling, there would be a much greater consumer interest in 3d printing.

analognoise 10y ago
I'd rather have logic taught in schools before we waste time with 3D printing. We need to help people develop their natural bullshit filters so that fake news, advertising, and rhetoric have less impact.
- rmelly 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think teaching logic will get you what you want here. Fake news may be false, bit it is often (mostly) logically consistent - this is part of the power.
gregpilling 10y ago
My kids is in 4th grade, and he has an engineering class. They sketch with pencil in isometric view, but this is good prep for using CAD.

patrickg_zill 10y ago

So at Tinkermill.org in Longmont CO, where I am a member, we have 3d printing machines. We also have a good machine shop, and some of the members got together and refurbished an old injection molding machine. So, we can 3d print a test, then can transform the finished design into instructions for the CNC machine, to produce a mold which goes into the injection molding machine. So far no one has used this to prototype a part that started a business, but that is a great way to use a 3d printer, as a first run prototype which can then be used for other manufacturing. A guy who is designing a game used both the 3d printer and laser cutter to make his prototype board and pieces. We also have a few whizzes who have whipped up replacement parts and e.g. hose adapters for the dust collector in the woodshop. Overall 3d printing is like the early days of the commercial Internet: people intuitively knew it was changing things, but had only scattered anecdotes as proof.

jakozaur 10y ago

By the way, which 3d Printer would you recommend for hobby use case? 1. Prefer plug and play, interested in making stuff not debugging 3d printers. Probably that exclude most of cheap 3d printers. 2. Hobby, so likely will go with FDM instead of SLA. FDM seems cheaper, faster and more materials for just a little precision loss. 3. Zortrax M200 (https://zortrax.com/ https://zortrax.com/) seems to be the best option. Any other suggestions?

legodt 10y ago

3d printing might not have had the huge impact expected for it in the consumer world, but in the professional world printing is hugely important. Getting a physical model of your cad file overnight from a black box at your desk or in your model shop is a workflow game changer. Make an ergonomic change to your grip? Test it out almost immediately. Manufacturer needs you to change the draft on your shell? Print it first before sending it out and make sure everything still fits. When previously you had to make engineering accuracy models all day in the shop or get a part made by a small run manufacturer, now prototyping and testing variations from cad can all be done in house. Consumers might not be directly benefiting from the advent of democratized 3d printers, but they are benefiting in the gains of efficiency at the firms designing their goods

erikb 10y ago

Oh, that was a painful read. Repeatedly they mentioned that all development to this point wasn't able to provide a cheap enough solution for the common user. And if you ever had a 3d printed piece in your hand you also know that the desktop printers still are not detailed and flexible enough. So in end effect the current status doesn't proof at all that there is not a market, just that the technology can't reach market yet.

erikb 10y ago

"Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it." Can anybody explain how that should work out? Usually people laugh about someone who only pretends.

abraae 10y ago
Pretty funny given recent events.

snarfy 10y ago

It's a useful tool for engineers, but not everybody is an engineer. It was hyped like it was a replicator from star trek. The novelty of printing little plastic figurines wears off quickly. At some point you realize that you can buy a bag of a much higher quality injection molded version of the same thing at the dollar store. They are useful for making things that don't yet exist, but that means it must be something you come up with and model yourself. And this is where they are no longer the tool of users, only engineers.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I just got a MonoPrice Select Mini a few weeks ago for $200, and spent about $30 on upgrades for it (an e3d hotend, the rest of the upgrades I printed myself), and about $80 on 4 1kg spools of filament. It's really great, I'm loving it so far. Been making my own things with OpenSCAD too, and some of my friends have been making things with SketchUp for me to print.

matthewhall 10y ago

Jeez now I realize why the maker bit at my school is never used and the $600 replicator 2 clones are

blhack 10y ago

From what I've heard/read, this is the best ~$1000 printer available right now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017IZBFB2/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2RRCDXZXQJUJ7&coliid=I8VCNVXQ3AOND https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017IZBFB2/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_tt... (There seems to be some curiosity in this thread about what printer you should get)

ideonexus 10y ago

3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up. The 3D printing community, like some coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity. In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.

leke 10y ago
It sounds a bit like we are at the stage when computers were using punch cards. Maybe in a decade or two, things will get a bit more interesting. I was thinking of getting a cheap 3D printer for Christmas, but will probably put it off now I realise it's not, as you say, pulg'n'play.
- pavlov 10y ago
  It sounds a bit like we are at the stage when computers were using punch cards. Maybe in a decade or two, things will get a bit more interesting. Agreed. MakerBot in 2012 was like trying to start Apple in 1962. What kind of personal computer could one build from the era's transistors and magnetic core memory? That primitive thing could have sparked someone's imagination, but it wouldn't have had any mass-market applications. 3D printing's Apple moment is still waiting for its equivalent of the integrated circuit (a technological enabler) followed by a VisiCalc (a killer application).