3 ms·

I mean, what do you think most people are using 3D printers to make?

• jacquesm 4y ago
  Sorry? What I think isn't really relevant. What I see is relevant and what I see is a lot of people making prototype hardware and small series stuff that would be very costly (sometimes impossible) to produce using any other method. It all depends on where you are looking. You claim - fairly categorically - that 'the "makerspace" has seemingly failed to produce any sort of meaningful Renaissance in small-scale US manufacturing' but that is a complete strawman, it only works if you assume that a renaissance in smallscale US manufacturing was the original goal and that never was the case. Makerspaces are not even a requirement to be part of the maker scene. Over the past couple of years I've seen elements of it all over industry and in series production up to several 100 units (probably a few in excess of that) of parts that you would have a pretty hard time making otherwise and with such low start-up costs. That you have an entirely different bar for success isn't an issue with the maker scene. I don't doubt that there are people that end up making things they throw away. But if you're building custom machinery the tools from the 'makerscene' have long escaped the hobby lab and are now a mainstay in any prototyping shop. Tooling, jigs, parts, gears(!), brackets of all shapes and sizes, adapters, custom plugs, cases, scientific gear for lab setups and so on. The list of items I've seen produced with these tools is longer than I care to list here.