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2011 3D Printing Predictions
- steveklabnik 16y agoThis is a pretty interesting list, mostly because I think they took what seemed like a 'normal' guess, and stretched it a bit. All of this happening would be pretty awesome, though.
- liuhenry 16y agoHow did MakerBot get started? Did they commercialize based on RepRap?
- bre 16y agoWe got started making repraps but decided to move away from the focus of self replication and start our own thing with the focus of bringing 3D printing to the masses by making a printer that's cheap, uses as many off the shelf parts as possible, and that we could produce with tools we had. We had a lasercutter at NYCResistor and I sat in front of that thing for weeks making the first few hundred MakerBots. We still strive to make our stuff compatible with RepRap machines so that folks who don't want to build the whole thing from scratch can get an extruder or electronics from us and hack it into their built from scratch machine.
- jonknee 16y agoWhy is there a 7 week lead time?
- bre 16y agoBecause parts took longer to get to us than expected and we're catching up on the backlog of preorders. It may end up being faster than 7 weeks.
- mkramlich 16y agonote to other entrepreneurs: they pivoted. made something people were willing to pay for. and shipped it, in exchange for money. so, they have the fundamentals down right.
- anthonycerra 16y ago3D printers are going to do for physical products what frameworks did for web apps. Personally, I'm super excited because it's going to chop my product development time into pieces.
- alimoeeny 16y agoReally? What do you use a 3D printer for? Last time I checked they were still imprecise to the point of being useless for real world jobs. What printer/material do you use?
- anthonycerra 16y agoWe don't use one yet so I may be getting ahead of myself, but it'll help get a proof of concept made in days instead of months. The iterative process of drawing something up in CAD, sending to a manufacturer, and testing the prototype is painfully expensive and time consuming. I'm not suggesting we'd use it for production, just early prototyping.
- mattbauer 16y agoI wouldn't say it's useless but they aren't primetime. You just can't get the tolerances you need out of them yet. The real world is all about tolerances and non mechanical engineers always forget this. We actually adjust our files for the 3D printer to get the tolerances closer. In the end, the speed, material cost, tolerances and finish won't make these printers ready for the real world in 2011. Sorry guys. And yes I do own a very nice Stratasys 3D printer and have access to an Exojet too.
- nickpinkston 16y agoTolerance gets less important as you move into the consumer market - surface finish is far more important. Sure, snap-fits need to be pretty tight to work well, but do you really think people will care if their earrings are 0.05" out of round? The main issue now is really materials and processing cost - it's expensive to get the materials because they're engineered to work with a machine, and there are still things like finish quality, color, etc. that need to improve, but there are tons are good products that can get around these constraints.
- dstein 16y agoAny predictions on how long until a 3D printer can print a 3D printer?
- bre 16y agoWebca did it this year! http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285
- mkramlich 16y agodesktop 3D printers are near the top of my list of geek toys/tools I want to get in the next year or so. i just can't justify them yet financially because I don't have any real need to do home prototyping of a physical product. but the moment I do it'll be like, "here comes a tax deduction!"
- cma 16y agoI'm surprised homebrew 3d scanning via kinect (and modded kinects that work at smaller scales) wasn't in there.