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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 mo

by 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.

replicatorblog 18y ago
Sho, you make good points, but the comparison is closer than you think. You mention the high cost of specialty fabrics, but the plastics market is even more complex. The 1-7 coding for recycling on plastic containers is a gross oversimplification. Plastics are engineered for specialty applications to be more flexible, heat resistant, more easily bonded to other plastics, etc. Trying to get an ounce of plastics like that will also cost considerable sums. To your point about 2D printing, think about how uniform the feedstocks are. 4 colors of ink can be sprayed on paper to recreate a rainbow of colors. 2D printing is almost platonic in its simplicity. 3D printers may work with a subset of materials in the future, but its a drop in the bucket. Also, I see clothes as a special case as well, but one that is MORE likely to be customized. Sure you may just need a commodity item like a black Tshirt, but clothing is one of the most personalized product cateogries. Custom neck ties, new fashions, printed Tshirts, etc. Just look at the startups in the space: Threadless, Cafepress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, etc.
- sho 18y ago
  Hm, also good points, but I still think your conclusions are too "confused by the present situation". For example, you rightly mention the awesome variety of plastics. But how many of them are really, when it comes down to it, essential to the functionality of the end product? I see many, many of these different plastics as existing not because of their inherent qualities in the end product but due to other factors. For example, you mention a type of plastic that bonds well to others. That is a manufacturing concern. It could be essential for the final idealised product to glue two plastics, but it could just as easily be an artefact of the manufacturing process. Another thing you fail to consider is the disappearance of the scale manufacturing incentive to reduce material costs. If you're making 100,000 copies of something, every percent reduction in your materials cost, and in the complexity of manufacture, becomes very significant. But if you're making 1, the materials cost is almost irrelevant, and you don't care about being able to stamp out one a second. How much could the removal of that factor influence the design? Consider a milk bottle. In manufacturing millions of them, there is every incentive to reduce costs. So we have the cheapest possible plastic which is food-safe but strong and moldable enough to have a handle, etc. Another type of plastic for a soft drink bottle. Another for a jar of honey, another for your takeaway food container. But every single one of these could actually be functionally replaced by, say, metal. The different plastics, the use of plastic at all, is not fundamental to the function, it is a side-effect of marginal costs in scale manufacturing. This is probably a bad example but I hope it shows the point. How many types of "building block" do we need? It is probably an unanswerable question but even so, it is surely orders of magnitude less than the question you're answering, which is "how many do we currently have". And your point about clothes - the "customisations" you are talking about are superficial only, just what is printed on the front! The actual clothing is identical. Cafepress do not design and manufacture a unique type of t-shirt just for you. You are actually kind of proving my point ;)

by sho 18y ago

replicatorblog 18y ago

Sho, you make good points, but the comparison is closer than you think. You mention the high cost of specialty fabrics, but the plastics market is even more complex. The 1-7 coding for recycling on plastic containers is a gross oversimplification. Plastics are engineered for specialty applications to be more flexible, heat resistant, more easily bonded to other plastics, etc. Trying to get an ounce of plastics like that will also cost considerable sums. To your point about 2D printing, think about how uniform the feedstocks are. 4 colors of ink can be sprayed on paper to recreate a rainbow of colors. 2D printing is almost platonic in its simplicity. 3D printers may work with a subset of materials in the future, but its a drop in the bucket. Also, I see clothes as a special case as well, but one that is MORE likely to be customized. Sure you may just need a commodity item like a black Tshirt, but clothing is one of the most personalized product cateogries. Custom neck ties, new fashions, printed Tshirts, etc. Just look at the startups in the space: Threadless, Cafepress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, etc.

sho 18y ago
Hm, also good points, but I still think your conclusions are too "confused by the present situation". For example, you rightly mention the awesome variety of plastics. But how many of them are really, when it comes down to it, essential to the functionality of the end product? I see many, many of these different plastics as existing not because of their inherent qualities in the end product but due to other factors. For example, you mention a type of plastic that bonds well to others. That is a manufacturing concern. It could be essential for the final idealised product to glue two plastics, but it could just as easily be an artefact of the manufacturing process. Another thing you fail to consider is the disappearance of the scale manufacturing incentive to reduce material costs. If you're making 100,000 copies of something, every percent reduction in your materials cost, and in the complexity of manufacture, becomes very significant. But if you're making 1, the materials cost is almost irrelevant, and you don't care about being able to stamp out one a second. How much could the removal of that factor influence the design? Consider a milk bottle. In manufacturing millions of them, there is every incentive to reduce costs. So we have the cheapest possible plastic which is food-safe but strong and moldable enough to have a handle, etc. Another type of plastic for a soft drink bottle. Another for a jar of honey, another for your takeaway food container. But every single one of these could actually be functionally replaced by, say, metal. The different plastics, the use of plastic at all, is not fundamental to the function, it is a side-effect of marginal costs in scale manufacturing. This is probably a bad example but I hope it shows the point. How many types of "building block" do we need? It is probably an unanswerable question but even so, it is surely orders of magnitude less than the question you're answering, which is "how many do we currently have". And your point about clothes - the "customisations" you are talking about are superficial only, just what is printed on the front! The actual clothing is identical. Cafepress do not design and manufacture a unique type of t-shirt just for you. You are actually kind of proving my point ;)