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3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
by grahamburger 9y ago
3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
- sigi45 9y agoThat was the main motivation why i never bought one. I had never good enough ideas to buy it for that price.
- icebraining 9y agoMe neither, but I have ordered a few prints for various projects involving home maintenance and theater props. Quite useful, if not life changing.
- chx 9y agoI believe the problem is the sort of plastic used. You need structural strength in most things and filament pieces melted together is just not cutting it.
- cheeze 9y agoAbsolutely. One area that they have revolutionized is casting. Hell, even Jay Leno's crew used a 3d printer to create prototype parts that were no longer made and then cast the plastic printed part into a sand mold using aluminum.
- vlehto 9y agoThe next step would be to 3D print the sand mold directly.
- greggman 9y agoI thought the point was you just use the plastic as a mold for something else
- swyx 9y agolittle plastic shapes? no. but big metal industrial parts that were impossible to machine might be a thing? I confess no knowledge as to their real commercial success so far.
- vlehto 9y agoYou need to beat castings. And this may surprise you, but the mechanical properties of casts are often superior to 3D prints.
- grmarcil 9y agoIn the consumer/household space, sure. 3D printing is huge in prototyping and hardware R&D though. High-end printers are even good enough for mass production runs now.
- Fomite 9y ago3D printing is absolutely revolutionizing a hobby of mine.
- lj3 9y ago> Maker of artisinal, small-batch simulation models for the discerning infectious disease consumer. Could you talk more about what that entails? That sounds fascinating as hell.
- Fomite 9y agoI think it is! Basically, I'm an epidemiologist, and I work on mathematical and computational models of disease spread, usually trying to respond to either clinical or policy questions. Let me know if you want more information?
- PeachPlum 9y agoAdidas breaks the mould with 3D-printed performance footwear https://www.adidas-group.com/en/media/news-archive/press-releases/2015/adidas-breaks-mould-3d-printed-performance-footwear/ https://www.adidas-group.com/en/media/news-archive/press-rel... And it's not all plastic The patents for laser sintering are running out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering my colleague at my Uni 3D printing society showed me a fully working planetary gear unit about 30mm x 30mm x 30mm yesterday, made from titanium and printed in one pass with zero assembly. It's coming
- vlehto 9y agoMetals can only be SLS printed in a vacuum. That makes it cost prohibitive for home use. It's cheaper to buy a small CNC machine and that's good enough for 99,9% of everything.
- IshKebab 9y agoThat's just because plastic trinkets aren't what they are useful for. For useful applications, like prototyping, repairs, bespoke items and so on they are going strong and still getting cheaper and better. I'm hoping we'll have some affordable SLA printers fairly soon.
- blattimwind 9y agoWhether or not folks in the shop find them useful seems to mainly depend on whether they want to put up with CAD packages in their hobby.
- gozur88 9y agoThe jury is still out on this one. 3D printing is used for some pretty serious industrial items, like rocket engines. Ultimately I think it's going to replace milling in most applications because you can print shapes you can't mill.
- wrinkl3 9y agoI feel like that technology needs more time. Give it a few more decades, a couple of breakthroughs and lots of small incremental advances and we might yet see something resembling the Feed from Diamond Age.
- GistNoesis 9y agoIt's already there working 24 hours a day in many makers home. Why isn't it taking the world faster ? This is a classic chicken and egg problem which is being solved daily via the market invisible hands. As a maker, what reduced my printing usage a few years back was the cost of the filament (which is now cheaper but can still be reduced by a 10x factor), and the noise of the machine (which can be made now noiseless). As a user, what hold me back is that the use cases aren't so numerous in a world where everything is factory made. But as soon as you decide to customize your environment, it becomes the missing component which allows you to adapt two objects together. As a 3d-designer, software wasn't really made for 3d printing. But now with OpenSCAD, objects can be made from source code, making any hobby programmer vastly more productive for the most current usage of 3d printing than an expert 3d-designer.
- theklub 9y agoOff-topic but, what printer do you recommend for starting out?
- GistNoesis 9y agoI use a Lulzbot Taz4 (with diy rudimentary enclosure), but a 3d printer is very dependent on the maker and what he intend to do with it, how much time, money and effort he is willing to invest so that's quite hard to answer. If you can find a local hackerspace, they usually have people which can give you good advice after a talk.
- milesvp 9y agoMy understanding is that 3d printing has greatly transformed product design work. You can do a lot of fast prototyping that used to take a lot of manual labour and turn around designs much faster. Then once the design is finalized you build your injection mold for mass production. But I agree that desktop 3d printing certainly didn't transform much in the home.
- cm2187 9y agoAnd that you can pretty much find anything you can think of on amazon & competitors. I really wanted to design and 3d print something, but it took me several years to find something I couldn't just order for under $5 on amazon. And even then I could have done something good enough and cheaper with lego bricks!
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoLego bricks or if you want something a bit more permanent, a bit of wood. The plastic really isn't a good material to do much with.
- cm2187 9y agoIf I had a basement where I could do some DIY, I could also have gone the metal/laser cutting and folding route (which one can order online for not much), and done a bit of welding. It seems pretty neat and easy to do and very durable. I made the mistake to 3d print in white plastic, which is turning yellow very quickly, not very durable as you say.
- segmondy 9y agoTesla and other companies are 3D printing metal engines and parts for rockets. 3D printing is amazing and in full effect. It just hasn't become available for the consumer to print whatever they want.
- gilbetron 9y agoI don't get it. 3D printing is massive, and is shaping our future. How did it not pan out?
- krapp 9y agoThe dream was that 3D printing would replace all manufacturing and distribution. That everyone was going to have a 3D printer in their home, and they would just be able to download patterns from the internet and get whatever they wanted, like replicators from Star Trek.
- grahamburger 9y agoAfter reading replies I guess I should have been more specific. Early on there was some hype around the idea that 3D printers would become as ubiquitous in homes as paper printers once were. I bought in to that a little bit, but it seems like that is (and probably always was) tremendously unlikely.