The Economist frontpage Feb 2010: Print Me a Stradivarius

3D Printing hits the home page of The Economist www.economist.com The violin illustrated was made using an EOS laser-sintering 3D printer (and apparently it plays beautifully). The Economist article claims that 3D printing from digital designs will transform manufacturing and allow more people to start making things. Read both articles here:



http://www.economist.com/node/18114327
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221

Highlights:
* Examples of 3D printed objects include aircraft landing gear, medical implants, jewellery, football boots, lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries, complex mechanical devices and customized mobile phones
* More than 20% of 3D printed output is now production product, not prototype
* The technical term for this field is 'additive manufacturing'
* Within Technologies have 3D printed a flexible 'chain mail' metal glove, available in steel or titanium
* A new industrial revolution is on the way
* With traditional manufacturing techniques, 90% of the material is waste, cut away swarf. With 3D pritning, unused material can be re-used to print another part. Typically, a 3D printed part requires about 10% of the material required otherwise.
* 3D printing uses less energy to create parts
* 3D printing is not always slower per part
* Machining a part traditionally means having material where you might not need it for the final product. 3D printing puts material only where needed.
* 3D printed parts can be lighter, e.g. in aerospace applications
* Although current 3D printers have small build chambers, gantry like devices will be able to print very large parts in the future
* 3D printing can create internal structure in a material. e.g. Titanium with inner bone like lattice
* A company called Digital Forming is working with mobile operators to apply consumers to order custom printed designs
* Shapeways is now printing more than 10,000 each month
* EOS claims that a single machine would allow a Dentist to print 450 unique dental crowns in a single day
* Stratasys are printing parts for their own range of 3D printers
* Factories of the future will have 3D printers working along side existing machines, e.g. milling, presses, foundries and plastic injection moulding
* Rapid Quality Manufacturing says that small to medium sized metal components can be 3D printed in hours or days, against days or weeks for traditional process. (And the printers can run 24/7 unattended)
* A team at Loughborough University has invented a high-speed sintering system and believes that it can make parts for Burton Snowboards for 16 cents each, competitive with injection moulding
* 3D printed lampshades has become an industry with sales volumes in the 1000s
* Prediction that within 5 years, it will be competitive to have 3D printed runs of 10,000s to 100,000s
* Expectation of the 'Digital Production Plant'  - less capital tied up in tooling costs, work in progress and raw materials
* Chinese companies are adopting the technology
* DHL organized a conference which posited threats to the logistics industry - i.e. print where you need things
* 3D printing lowers the cost of entry to manufacturing  (analogy with early PC industry)
* Good ideas will now be able to copied ever faster, so expect some battles on intellectual property
* Competitive advantages may be shorter-lived than ever before
* "The beneficiary will be customers - revolution may not be too strong a word"

Printing Models for Exhibitions

The World's First 3D Printed Musical Instrument - A 3D Printed Flute

Is this a breakthrough? A flute, printed in 3D.

Is 3D Printing a niche technology? Just one of several fabrication techniques. Or is it a significant breakthrough that will transform manufacturing supply chains and economies with impacts on the scale of the first industrial revolution, or, the invention of Gutenberg's book printing press. Some examples of newly 3D-printed objects hint at what's to come.

Watch this fascinating video of the team at MIT Media Lab who have attempted - and succeeded - to 3D print a working flute (perhaps the first 3D printed musical instrument?).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHgszH0aqI

Are Voxels next?

Imagine a desktop fabricator capable of making perfectly repeatable, arbitrary, multi material 3D objects with microscale precision. The objects would be composed of millions or even billions of small physical building blocks (voxels). Some building blocks could be hard, some could be soft. Some could be red, others green or blue. Some could be conductive and others could perform computation or store energy. Some could even be sensors and others actuators, and so on and so forth. With a relatively small repertoire of building block types and a rapid assembler, one could assemble a relatively large variety of machines at high resolution. How would that work?

http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/Rapid_Assembler

Is Shapeways a shop or a fab shop?

Is Shapeways a shop, or a fab shop? It's both of these today, but is that the right model? Offering the service of printing a design is very different from offering a shop from which to buy things. I can get jewelry, art, home decor etc, from 1000s of outlets. Some of it may even have been 3D printed. Is it realistic for Shapeways to specialize as an outlet for 3D printed objects? Wouldn't it be better for Shapeways to focus on being the best online 3D print shop, and to work with other retail outlets for distribution and channel? Isn't it simply a distraction for Shapeways to try to be a shop as well as a printer? Doesn't it limit the audience? For example, wouldn't authors of 3D work prefer their output to be available on Amazon? Wouldn't people who print through Shapeways appreciate placing their work (if not for personal use) through Amazon, with Shapeways for fulfillment? Wouldn't this generate more orders to Shapeways?

No doubt Shapeways have thought deeply about business model options. I have not. I'm just throwing this out for discussion. Let's go a step further.

If 3D print shops open up all over the planet, what will make you use one or the other? Will it be the experience of designing an object, or of placing an order, or the range of starter designs to mass-customize, or the repository of reusable objects to draw from, or the quality of the printing, or the simplicity of fulfillment, or some other factor? Will having already printed objects (in store) in a gallery make any difference? Does Shapeways want to be vertically integrated, or to work with retail and channel partners? What's going to drive the market? Unless the market blooms for on-demand consumer 3D printing, Shapeways will also be limited. So, what's the single thing that Shapeways can do to drive demand from consumers for 3D printed objects?

Looking at the Shapeways site today, its kind of a hybrid luxury goods shop, and bespoke tailor. Is this the future for consumer 3D printing? Or some other model? Indeed, when 'goods' can be printed, how does the relationship between designer, manufacturer, supply chain and consumer change? Where is the sweet spot for Shapeways?

ZCorp ZPrinter 650 Marketing Video

390,000 colors, 600x540 dpi, feature size 0.1mm, vertical build speed 28mm/hour, layer thickness 0.089mm to 0.102mm, number of jets 1520 .... Watch the video:

http://www.zcorp.com/documents/259_650Video.wvx

The Very First 3D Printer Hobby Shop: The MakerBot BotCave Retail Store

87th Avenue, Brooklyn. It's like the early 70s all over again! I remember visiting the first hobby computer board shops in London. I remember buying my first single board computer. It was called a NASCOM. It was a UK design. It was based on the Zilog Z80 processor. Yes, I had to solder a few hundred components. It took a year to get working. I spent the next 2 years writing a compiler for it in Z80 assembler code. It worked. I still have it, and it still boots (at think I think it does - I tried 2 years ago and none of the capacitors had rotted, so all was ok). It had 64k RAM because I added a 48K RAM card, also built from discrete components. It eventually made it into a rack, with other cards, all built from discrete components.

And so here we are in 2010, and MakerBot Industries has set up shop on 87th Avenue, Brooklyn.

Will the personal computer explosion that followed the period of intense experimentation in the 70s with single board computers be repeated with 3D Printing? Will 3DP be bigger? Will a 3DP capability have as much, or more, impact on the world?

Visit the first hobby shop for 3D Printing here:



http://www.makerbot.com/