4 ms·

Why 3D printers won't go mainstream

23 points by replicatorblog 18y ago

trapper 18y ago
The arguments presented are really off-base. The idea of a 3d printer is to find a model on the internet for free (or $) press print and use the "thing". Very, very simple. Sewing machines were completely different. First, you had to get a pattern. Patterns weren't cheap and weren't easily available. There was no decent distribution mechanism for patterns, which is half the problem. Then you had to learn how to sew. Then you must collect the materials. For each garment, you would input time. Tell me how these two models are anything alike? And how could a person from a 3d printing company not get it?
- replicatorblog 18y ago
  I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation. e.g. people can improve designs of physical object just as they can work on OS code. For this to be a reality it will require people to develop a strong sense of mechanical design and fluency with CAD software. Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics. To make an object of any complexity you would need to gather electronic components, perform assembly, which may require secondary skills like soldering. Given the state of the art and development roadmap homegrown manufacturers would need to sand and paint the output of the 3D printer to achieve a "commercial" finish and tht requires time and training. At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers.
  - mnemonicsloth 18y ago
    At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers. Surely this is better explained by the (current) lack of overlap between the community of tailors and the community of people who are savvy about the possibilities of web-based collaboration. There are, e.g. pattern-exchange sites out there for people who like making their own clothes.
    - replicatorblog 18y ago
      To some degree, I would argue that the crafting community has a strong track record of sharing, but usually in an offline way e.g. sewing circles, meeting friends at sewing supply shops, etc. The point I am trying to make is that even though most people (esp. customization enthusiasts) could at this time make their own clothes few do. Even the legions that read Craft: magazine who are tech savvy and crafty don't seem to be making clothes en masse, but the argument for 3D printers is that once they are cheap enough people will flock to them.
      - mnemonicsloth 18y ago
        With respect, I think you only think you're making a different point. The lack of overlap goes both ways. There are few sewing machine enthusiasts who share designs online. Similarly, few of the people who want to share stuff online think clothes are the obvious place to start. Is this really that surprising, in light of what you know about hacker culture? To use your HTML example, you're saying that since few early web hackers had pages dedicated to kitty cats and bad poetry, nobody interested in such things was ever going to turn up online.
  - jerf 18y ago
    "I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation." How are those opposing forces? I am surprised to read so many comments and see nobody articulate what I thought the 3D-printing idea was, which is that it will bring open source to the physical world. No more, no less. You don't need a degree in mechanical design to use an open-source-powered 3D printer anymore than you need to be a programmer to use open source, with roughly the same capabilities and tradeoffs. Most of the rest of the problems cited in this discussion are supposed to be solved by automation; for instance, I can easily imagine how to help people stock up on raw plastic stock with arbitrary degrees of customization, that's not even remotely a challenge. "Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics." Considering that 3D printers only barely exist today, basing your skepticism of the concept around only the progress that will be made in the next 5 to 10 years is an odd position to take. (And I feel I'm being generous when you explicitly say "today".) There is nothing fundamentally challenging about integrating electronics into a sophisticated 3D printer; it's only engineering of the type open source does every day. We could make a pretty decent pass at a generic electronic loadout today and it will only get easier over time. Already we see full Linux machines barely larger than the plug they attach to. In fact, it's not even that 3D printers will be "like" open source, the hope is that it will be open source. 3D printers are just another hardware peripheral, hardly different in principle from 2D printers or graphics cards or audio cards or any of the other myriad bits of complicated technology already attached to computing power. Trying to separate the "3D open source community" from the greater open source community would be as futile as trying to separate the "3D graphics open source community" from the greater open source community; oh, there will be specializations and such but there's no way you could produce a criterion that cleanly separates each and every project into either "3D" or "not 3D", the way you can separate "open source" and "not open source" (for a suitably well-defined definition).
    - replicatorblog 18y ago
      Jerf, a couple points: 1. How are those opposing forces? The first statement would be me selecting an item out of a catalog and printing it as a designer intended, so a traditional ecommerce system, but with no delivery, just on demand manufacturing. The second would be more of an open source model, but customization could be limited through DRM. 2. I didn't say people would need to have degrees in mechanical design, just that they would have to become skilled in it. For most people this is going to take an investment of hundreds of hours. 2. I think you are underestimating the "ease" that plastics for manufacture can be lined up. I think people are lulled into a sense of ease when it comes to 3D printing because we have seen such dramatic improvement in info tech and desktop printing. In the case of software your raw materials are 1 & 0's with 2D printing you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. Moving into atoms the variety expands incredibly quickly. Materials all have quirks and the process that manipulates them further complicates the matter. 3. With electronics you are still going to face issues. First what is the "ink cartridge" analog for electronic components? How do you handle the regulatory issues? UL, FCC? I'm sure it can be done, its just not that easy. 4. 3D printing is a 20 year old industry. It faces long development cycles and requires significant and costly improvements in material science. Thanks for your generosity, but I will stand by my skepticism. In closing I don't doubt the rise of "open source" manufacturing. I just don't think 3D printing will have major role in it. You seem to have confidence and a vision for how to make 3D printing ubiquitous. I hope you help move the state of the art forward.
replicatorblog 18y ago
Just FYI, This post was a continuation of a "3D Printing Smackdown" between the Replicator Blog (http://is.gd/ojHl http://is.gd/ojHl) and the always entertaining SolidSmack Blog (http://is.gd/ojHB http://is.gd/ojHB) on the likelihood of 3D printing reaching the mainstream consumer.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
sho 18y ago
I don't get this article at all. If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve, massively? It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something, so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot. There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from that too much. But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's supposed to cover everything. No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone know someone who doesn't own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to print. Is that just for nerds? When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print. Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time - will be built. How is that not going to be popular? It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable. This guy needs to think more long-term.
ftse 18y ago
You could make the same argument regarding typewriters and word processing software. I would think many more copies of word processing packages are in active use than was ever the case for typewriters. Word processing is several orders of magnitude easier than typing and as a result it's an incredible success. If a 3D printer allows you to pick a design from the web, click on the 'fab' button and start using your new product within the day, expect them to sell like hot cakes when the price drops.
mhb 18y ago
This is only a temporary concern due to the cost of current 3D manufacturing. A big, expensive machine is needed to provide the mechanical stiffness needed to produce something of a satisfactory resolution at a reasonable rate of production in a useful sized work envelope. These are the same factors which drive the cost of lathes and mills. So if you're willing to accept very low resolution outputs produced slowly, you can get that today. Once molecular manufacturing is viable, this conversation is over so there's not much point in getting too agitated about precisely when the size, cost, resolution and work envelope of 3D printers makes it more appealing to have one in your house or to have Shapeways print it and mail it to you.
- mhb 18y ago
  Just as a point of interest, this is a model of the Flying Spaghetti Monster which I designed using Rhino and had printed at Shapeways. http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html
sbaqai 18y ago
The 3D printers we have in the architecture school print starch and ABS models. They cost around $3-4 per cubic inch, and one method of reducing cost is to create hollow volumes instead of solid ones. But then they're reduced to visual study models, rather than any potentially functional ones. I'm interested in seeing how the print materials will evolve. Current materials are great for prototyping and generating forms, but materials like starch are very brittle, and anything less than .125" thick will usually break. It would be great to print models that are not only functional and durable, but viable as end products. A lot of attention is on 3D printing, but that's connected to a larger set of technologies that make up "digital fabrication," which includes laser-cutting and stereolithography, etc. Laser-cutting is as significant as 3D printing, I think, as you can design interesting 2D patterns as well as folded surfaces, that can be aesthetic or even structural. For one of my projects this semester, I created a nice set of computer speakers for my macbook, out of foamcore(!). I lasercut the foam to create the housing for the speakers, and encase the circuit board that had the power and volume controls. The next step is to buy higher-end speakers and create the housing out of high-grade wood for better acoustics. Anyway, the point is, you can make a lot of interesting things with digital fabrication.. I don't think it'll be as ubiquitous as inkjet printing, but more similar to the structure of Software Development Kits, where industrial designers will facilitate co-creating your customized products. I can imagine separate teams of designers making customized laptop chassis, medical equipment, cell phones, etc...
- replicatorblog 18y ago
  sbaqai, you are absolutely correct. 3D printing gets a lot of glory, but it is just one of the amazing technologies changing manufacturing. Laser cutters are another great example, but so are the home use plotters like the CriCut that put mass customization in the hands of anyone with $300.
jpwagner 18y ago
Why does anyone want a 3D printer? Graphic 3D modeling is easy and useful and I have to guess (based on the tools and practice people get in this day and age) that generation to generation people are improving at picturing abstractions/descriptions. Is this tool even necessary anymore? Isn't it a leftover "futuristic" device from the 20th century?
- gollywog 18y ago
  3D printing isn't just used for making models, there's plenty of other applications. There are times when a personally customizable object is more suitable than a mass produced one, and that is what 3D printing allows.Eg, a small plastic component breaks, its better to just fab the little part up than replace the whole thing.

The arguments presented are really off-base. The idea of a 3d printer is to find a model on the internet for free (or $) press print and use the "thing". Very, very simple. Sewing machines were completely different. First, you had to get a pattern. Patterns weren't cheap and weren't easily available. There was no decent distribution mechanism for patterns, which is half the problem. Then you had to learn how to sew. Then you must collect the materials. For each garment, you would input time. Tell me how these two models are anything alike? And how could a person from a 3d printing company not get it?

replicatorblog 18y ago
I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation. e.g. people can improve designs of physical object just as they can work on OS code. For this to be a reality it will require people to develop a strong sense of mechanical design and fluency with CAD software. Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics. To make an object of any complexity you would need to gather electronic components, perform assembly, which may require secondary skills like soldering. Given the state of the art and development roadmap homegrown manufacturers would need to sand and paint the output of the 3D printer to achieve a "commercial" finish and tht requires time and training. At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers.
- mnemonicsloth 18y ago
  At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers. Surely this is better explained by the (current) lack of overlap between the community of tailors and the community of people who are savvy about the possibilities of web-based collaboration. There are, e.g. pattern-exchange sites out there for people who like making their own clothes.
  - replicatorblog 18y ago
    To some degree, I would argue that the crafting community has a strong track record of sharing, but usually in an offline way e.g. sewing circles, meeting friends at sewing supply shops, etc. The point I am trying to make is that even though most people (esp. customization enthusiasts) could at this time make their own clothes few do. Even the legions that read Craft: magazine who are tech savvy and crafty don't seem to be making clothes en masse, but the argument for 3D printers is that once they are cheap enough people will flock to them.
    - mnemonicsloth 18y ago
      With respect, I think you only think you're making a different point. The lack of overlap goes both ways. There are few sewing machine enthusiasts who share designs online. Similarly, few of the people who want to share stuff online think clothes are the obvious place to start. Is this really that surprising, in light of what you know about hacker culture? To use your HTML example, you're saying that since few early web hackers had pages dedicated to kitty cats and bad poetry, nobody interested in such things was ever going to turn up online.
- jerf 18y ago
  "I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized" innovation." How are those opposing forces? I am surprised to read so many comments and see nobody articulate what I thought the 3D-printing idea was, which is that it will bring open source to the physical world. No more, no less. You don't need a degree in mechanical design to use an open-source-powered 3D printer anymore than you need to be a programmer to use open source, with roughly the same capabilities and tradeoffs. Most of the rest of the problems cited in this discussion are supposed to be solved by automation; for instance, I can easily imagine how to help people stock up on raw plastic stock with arbitrary degrees of customization, that's not even remotely a challenge. "Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics." Considering that 3D printers only barely exist today, basing your skepticism of the concept around only the progress that will be made in the next 5 to 10 years is an odd position to take. (And I feel I'm being generous when you explicitly say "today".) There is nothing fundamentally challenging about integrating electronics into a sophisticated 3D printer; it's only engineering of the type open source does every day. We could make a pretty decent pass at a generic electronic loadout today and it will only get easier over time. Already we see full Linux machines barely larger than the plug they attach to. In fact, it's not even that 3D printers will be "like" open source, the hope is that it will be open source. 3D printers are just another hardware peripheral, hardly different in principle from 2D printers or graphics cards or audio cards or any of the other myriad bits of complicated technology already attached to computing power. Trying to separate the "3D open source community" from the greater open source community would be as futile as trying to separate the "3D graphics open source community" from the greater open source community; oh, there will be specializations and such but there's no way you could produce a criterion that cleanly separates each and every project into either "3D" or "not 3D", the way you can separate "open source" and "not open source" (for a suitably well-defined definition).
  - replicatorblog 18y ago
    Jerf, a couple points: 1. How are those opposing forces? The first statement would be me selecting an item out of a catalog and printing it as a designer intended, so a traditional ecommerce system, but with no delivery, just on demand manufacturing. The second would be more of an open source model, but customization could be limited through DRM. 2. I didn't say people would need to have degrees in mechanical design, just that they would have to become skilled in it. For most people this is going to take an investment of hundreds of hours. 2. I think you are underestimating the "ease" that plastics for manufacture can be lined up. I think people are lulled into a sense of ease when it comes to 3D printing because we have seen such dramatic improvement in info tech and desktop printing. In the case of software your raw materials are 1 & 0's with 2D printing you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. Moving into atoms the variety expands incredibly quickly. Materials all have quirks and the process that manipulates them further complicates the matter. 3. With electronics you are still going to face issues. First what is the "ink cartridge" analog for electronic components? How do you handle the regulatory issues? UL, FCC? I'm sure it can be done, its just not that easy. 4. 3D printing is a 20 year old industry. It faces long development cycles and requires significant and costly improvements in material science. Thanks for your generosity, but I will stand by my skepticism. In closing I don't doubt the rise of "open source" manufacturing. I just don't think 3D printing will have major role in it. You seem to have confidence and a vision for how to make 3D printing ubiquitous. I hope you help move the state of the art forward.

replicatorblog 18y ago

Just FYI, This post was a continuation of a "3D Printing Smackdown" between the Replicator Blog (http://is.gd/ojHl http://is.gd/ojHl) and the always entertaining SolidSmack Blog (http://is.gd/ojHB http://is.gd/ojHB) on the likelihood of 3D printing reaching the mainstream consumer.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

sho 18y ago

I don't get this article at all. If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve, massively? It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something, so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot. There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from that too much. But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's supposed to cover everything. No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone know someone who doesn't own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to print. Is that just for nerds? When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print. Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time - will be built. How is that not going to be popular? It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable. This guy needs to think more long-term.

ftse 18y ago

You could make the same argument regarding typewriters and word processing software. I would think many more copies of word processing packages are in active use than was ever the case for typewriters. Word processing is several orders of magnitude easier than typing and as a result it's an incredible success. If a 3D printer allows you to pick a design from the web, click on the 'fab' button and start using your new product within the day, expect them to sell like hot cakes when the price drops.

mhb 18y ago

This is only a temporary concern due to the cost of current 3D manufacturing. A big, expensive machine is needed to provide the mechanical stiffness needed to produce something of a satisfactory resolution at a reasonable rate of production in a useful sized work envelope. These are the same factors which drive the cost of lathes and mills. So if you're willing to accept very low resolution outputs produced slowly, you can get that today. Once molecular manufacturing is viable, this conversation is over so there's not much point in getting too agitated about precisely when the size, cost, resolution and work envelope of 3D printers makes it more appealing to have one in your house or to have Shapeways print it and mail it to you.

mhb 18y ago
Just as a point of interest, this is a model of the Flying Spaghetti Monster which I designed using Rhino and had printed at Shapeways. http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html

sbaqai 18y ago

The 3D printers we have in the architecture school print starch and ABS models. They cost around $3-4 per cubic inch, and one method of reducing cost is to create hollow volumes instead of solid ones. But then they're reduced to visual study models, rather than any potentially functional ones. I'm interested in seeing how the print materials will evolve. Current materials are great for prototyping and generating forms, but materials like starch are very brittle, and anything less than .125" thick will usually break. It would be great to print models that are not only functional and durable, but viable as end products. A lot of attention is on 3D printing, but that's connected to a larger set of technologies that make up "digital fabrication," which includes laser-cutting and stereolithography, etc. Laser-cutting is as significant as 3D printing, I think, as you can design interesting 2D patterns as well as folded surfaces, that can be aesthetic or even structural. For one of my projects this semester, I created a nice set of computer speakers for my macbook, out of foamcore(!). I lasercut the foam to create the housing for the speakers, and encase the circuit board that had the power and volume controls. The next step is to buy higher-end speakers and create the housing out of high-grade wood for better acoustics. Anyway, the point is, you can make a lot of interesting things with digital fabrication.. I don't think it'll be as ubiquitous as inkjet printing, but more similar to the structure of Software Development Kits, where industrial designers will facilitate co-creating your customized products. I can imagine separate teams of designers making customized laptop chassis, medical equipment, cell phones, etc...

replicatorblog 18y ago
sbaqai, you are absolutely correct. 3D printing gets a lot of glory, but it is just one of the amazing technologies changing manufacturing. Laser cutters are another great example, but so are the home use plotters like the CriCut that put mass customization in the hands of anyone with $300.

jpwagner 18y ago

Why does anyone want a 3D printer? Graphic 3D modeling is easy and useful and I have to guess (based on the tools and practice people get in this day and age) that generation to generation people are improving at picturing abstractions/descriptions. Is this tool even necessary anymore? Isn't it a leftover "futuristic" device from the 20th century?

gollywog 18y ago
3D printing isn't just used for making models, there's plenty of other applications. There are times when a personally customizable object is more suitable than a mass produced one, and that is what 3D printing allows.Eg, a small plastic component breaks, its better to just fab the little part up than replace the whole thing.