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Several people have commented on how this will change appliances and toys. Let's look at this popular hundred dollar coffee maker: http://amzn.com/B004SOZVQ2

Several people have commented on how this will change appliances and toys. Let's look at this popular hundred dollar coffee maker: http://amzn.com/B004SOZVQ2 http://amzn.com/B004SOZVQ2 which one could order within seconds and have it delivered within two days. Just from the picture, one can see it has at least two dozen parts made from seven different materials ranging from injected molded plastic, stainless steel, glass, as well as electronic components. It would be incredibly time consuming and wasteful to print each of these pieces with a 3D printer. As others suggested, you could print a custom injection mold for each component, but then you would need the injection molding machine, several different kinds of raw plastics, and some means to get rid of the unused, potentially toxic, materials. Okay, to complex. How about a simple toy, like this ten dollar Nerf gun. http://amzn.com/B0002UP0IA http://amzn.com/B0002UP0IA Again from the picture one can see seventeen different pieces all different colors and at least three types of plastic and a least one metal spring. This gun could be made with 3D printing technology, but it would waste an incredible amount of material and would take a fair amount of time. You would still have to order the darts and spring separately. I could see someone wanting to make this themselves; those who like legos, model trains etc. 3D printing can be world changing for hobbyists. The rest of us have already had our world changed by modern manufacturing, global supply chains, and online retail.

Peaker 14y ago
3d printers will print designs optimized for them, rather than ones optimized for mass production. Spend 100$ and wait a few days, or spend a few bucks and wait a few hours? The question is whether a coffee maker can be made from less materials in a way compatible with cheap 3d printing, and there is no reason to believe it won't be possible.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The fantasy of desktop manufacturing may not ever come to be, but 3D printing will likely be part of an even more astounding revolution in manufacturing coming in the next few decades. And that is fully automated and quickly reconfigurable manufacturing. Today, to manufacture something like an iphone or a car you have to set up an assembly line, you have to spend a lot of time designing the manufacturing processes of the device. The process of creating a whole supply chain and an assembly line to make thousands of devices is very, very different from what it would take for someone to make a single prototype. And this is why there aren't millions of companies making phones and cars and whatnot, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of resources to manufacture anything. But this will change. As manufacturing becomes more automated and as the tooling for automated manufacturing improves the interface between manufacturing sub-contractor and product designer (say, foxconn vs. apple) can potentially become purely software. Meaning that instead of having to hire a bunch of people to oversee setting up a manufacturing facility you simply upload a few files containing CAD diagrams, specs, wiring info, etc. And instead of being optimized for producing many thousands of products after extensive reconfiguring of the manual labor intensive assembly line the factories can be optimized for producing as few as a handful of finished items. How does that change things? Well, it might mean that manufacturing can be more closely located near consumers. If you have a dozen identical automated factories spread across the world then you can simply produce the same item out of each of them. Also, if there is less latency in spinning up / spinning down the production of a given item then it could mean that production could be more "on demand" than the norm today. If a factory only a few hundred kilometers away can be spun up in a matter of hours in order to produce some item and can add thousands of units that could be on the shelves in a matter of hours then it's much less necessary to overproduce. Also, if a tiny company can leverage automated manufacturing firms for production then this could result in a sea change for all manufactured goods. Boutique manufactured goods could become the norm rather than the universal, mass produced goods of today. What happens when a company could crowd source a new smart phone model for only a few tens of thousands of dollars with a team of only a few designers and engineers and still produce hundreds or even thousands of devices with the same production quality as apple's iphones? And, of course, what happens when you can start revving the design of an item not just on the scale of years or months but on the scale of weeks or days? And, of course. What happens when you start making factories that can produce factories? All of these things are near certainties within the next 5 decades if not far sooner. The revolution is coming.

Peaker 14y ago

3d printers will print designs optimized for them, rather than ones optimized for mass production. Spend 100$ and wait a few days, or spend a few bucks and wait a few hours? The question is whether a coffee maker can be made from less materials in a way compatible with cheap 3d printing, and there is no reason to believe it won't be possible.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

The fantasy of desktop manufacturing may not ever come to be, but 3D printing will likely be part of an even more astounding revolution in manufacturing coming in the next few decades. And that is fully automated and quickly reconfigurable manufacturing. Today, to manufacture something like an iphone or a car you have to set up an assembly line, you have to spend a lot of time designing the manufacturing processes of the device. The process of creating a whole supply chain and an assembly line to make thousands of devices is very, very different from what it would take for someone to make a single prototype. And this is why there aren't millions of companies making phones and cars and whatnot, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of resources to manufacture anything. But this will change. As manufacturing becomes more automated and as the tooling for automated manufacturing improves the interface between manufacturing sub-contractor and product designer (say, foxconn vs. apple) can potentially become purely software. Meaning that instead of having to hire a bunch of people to oversee setting up a manufacturing facility you simply upload a few files containing CAD diagrams, specs, wiring info, etc. And instead of being optimized for producing many thousands of products after extensive reconfiguring of the manual labor intensive assembly line the factories can be optimized for producing as few as a handful of finished items. How does that change things? Well, it might mean that manufacturing can be more closely located near consumers. If you have a dozen identical automated factories spread across the world then you can simply produce the same item out of each of them. Also, if there is less latency in spinning up / spinning down the production of a given item then it could mean that production could be more "on demand" than the norm today. If a factory only a few hundred kilometers away can be spun up in a matter of hours in order to produce some item and can add thousands of units that could be on the shelves in a matter of hours then it's much less necessary to overproduce. Also, if a tiny company can leverage automated manufacturing firms for production then this could result in a sea change for all manufactured goods. Boutique manufactured goods could become the norm rather than the universal, mass produced goods of today. What happens when a company could crowd source a new smart phone model for only a few tens of thousands of dollars with a team of only a few designers and engineers and still produce hundreds or even thousands of devices with the same production quality as apple's iphones? And, of course, what happens when you can start revving the design of an item not just on the scale of years or months but on the scale of weeks or days? And, of course. What happens when you start making factories that can produce factories? All of these things are near certainties within the next 5 decades if not far sooner. The revolution is coming.