[Dagoth Ur]

My point was never about suppression. Rather it was about the bourgeoisie being best positioned to aquire patents and material rights. Afterall the one with money wins in the courts. They won't suppress 3D printing but you'll have to buy the rights to print certain things and acquiring the raw material will also come under contract. Real production differs from shareware significantly.

[Ummon]

yeah the "big corporations" won't allow the petty bourgeois to do anything


http://reprapbook.appspot.com/

never underestimate engineers and their ability to get their hands on something cool and fun

[Dagoth Ur]

Yeah because that's equivalent to altering production in a fundamental way.

[Brother of Karl]

Producing and distributing working CAD models for complex machines and the like will always be a highly specialized, expensive job. That said, I see no logistical reason why 3d printing won't revolutionize and decentralize many types of manufacturing. The big advantage of additive manufacturing (3d printing) is that it is pretty much a vertically integrated style of manufacturing. One only needs the 3d printer and raw materials and machine instructions and you're all set. In traditional manufacturing, many small machine shops and other suppliers mass produce small components and the large manufacturing company assembles and distributes it (manufacturing is already pretty decentralized and one can break into the industry at a low level for less than $100k startup capital).

However, just as today there are computers owned by consumers that can do amazing things by last decade's standards, but also very expensive supercomputers owned by large tech companies, the same rule would apply to 3d printers.

In 20 years, everyone will have a general purpose consumer grade 3d printer that can make fairly complex machines under a certain size in a short period of time, like a set of scissors, a seed spreader or even a toaster, plus easy to assemble larger machines like a bicycle. Today, some of these things are already starting to be printed by engineers with high level 3d printers and a lot of specialized training and tinkering.

My guess is that the standard business model once 3d printing moves past the infancy stage to mass market will be similar to the google app store, where you pay to download a cad program for whatever it is you need, and then the machine does the rest.

[Ummon]

http://store.makerbot.com/replicator

of course they have the mini as well for under $1500 it is designed to be used by someone without technical expertise. They're only going to get cheaper, easier to use, be able to utilize more kinds of materials and perhaps moving parts. Internet piracy and private sharing networks will let people bypass licenses. In addition, popular demand for things like printed human skulls, heart valves, etc will force the price down as a human rights issue

[sans-culotte]

In 20 years, everyone will have a general purpose consumer grade 3d printer that can make fairly complex machines under a certain size in a short period of time, like a set of scissors, a seed spreader or even a toaster, plus easy to assemble larger machines like a bicycle. Today, some of these things are already starting to be printed by engineers with high level 3d printers and a lot of specialized training and tinkering.

How on earth would a 3d printer "print" metallic components?
The only thing domestic printers will ever be able to produce are single-colour plastic items, and even so mostly for vanity and a little for highly unique components (e.g. a unique pipe for a unique space) because unit cost is and always will be so much higher than anything produced by injection moulding, and quality much lower.
Sure at some point they will be as widespread as ink printers are now (having said that, I hate ink printers and don't own one - I prefer using public printers), but domestic printers will not revolutionize anything in the manufacturing process just as the ink printer did not change the publishing industry.

[Brother of Karl]

There's no reason we won't have consumer grade 3d printers that could include circuitry in things they print. Actually melting metal into pathways might not be the easiest way, but there are probably conductive plastics, and I know for a fact that there are highly conductive ceramics. Any of these techniques could be included in cheap, mass produced 3d printers, or even in self replicating (and therefore cheap) 3d printers. There are already commercial grade and experimental 3d printers that can print with multiple materials at once. It's only a matter of time before we can make it easy and cheap enough for consumer grade machines as well.

[mikema63]

http://www.shapeways.com/materials/steel

Metal printers.

[Decky]

Shut up Mike sans-culotte does not want to be botherd with facts.

[sans-culotte]

There's no reason we won't have consumer grade 3d printers that could include circuitry in things they print. Actually melting metal into pathways might not be the easiest way, but there are probably conductive plastics, and I know for a fact that there are highly conductive ceramics. Any of these techniques could be included in cheap, mass produced 3d printers, or even in self replicating (and therefore cheap) 3d printers. There are already commercial grade and experimental 3d printers that can print with multiple materials at once. It's only a matter of time before we can make it easy and cheap enough for consumer grade machines as well.

Conductive elements wouldn't actually need to be printed if you were making an appliance, you would just add wires later on, again, the only thing that the actual printer can be used for is the plastic frame, which would be more expensive to make and worse quality than one produced by injection.

But you also mentioned things like scissors and bikes, which need actual metal components.

Mike, seriously?!?! Did you actually think that it's possible to print metal? Those are decorative items made with metal powder held together by glue. It's even more useless than the sh*tty printed plastic items.

[Brother of Karl]

The point of a consumer 3d printer would be to be more customizable (and possibly cheaper eventually) than mass production and easier than assembling something from a kit. Mark my words, within 30 years, there will be no need to do the wiring yourself and many Chinese manufacturers will be out of business.

Can you think of any fundamental reason why 3d printing cannot ever compete on quality or price with injection moulding or even more advanced CNC processes? I think you just lack vision and are pessimistic. 30 years ago, people thought CNC lathes and milling machines could never replace skilled machinists, but the machinist has completely switched from the art of using the manual machines to G-code and CAD/CAM programming and tool setup. I would know, I used to work as a machine operator.

Right now 3d printing only lags behind on maximum tolerances (resolution), but that aspect is improving rapidly. In 10 years, any machine shop worth their salt will own and operate an industrial 3d printer.

[mikema63]

The glue holds the metal particles together only till their fused.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143552-3d-printing-with-metal-the-final-frontier-of-additive-manufacturing

To compete with modern manufacturing methods, perhaps the fastest method of metal printing is to deposit a powder metal matrix that contains binders. After each layer is deposited, the binder is melted and the metal is temporarily held together until it is fused in a final bake in an oven. The part can be printed entirely in this way, or just a shell can be printed which can then be used to mold metals of a lower melting point.

This is the simplest method, but not the only one.

You can read about the others in the article, including the one nasa uses to manufacture parts for spacecraft.

[Rancid]

Enjoy having to replace piping that squirrels/ mice have chewed through every few years and having crappy push fittings leak. Copper piping will only go out of date if water does.

Drain lines use to be made out of cast iron. These days people use PVC. Iron has about a 50 year life span, I'm not sure what PVC is.

With respect the Linux. Linux makes a lot of money for a lot of people. Most of you probably don't realize it, but embedded Linux pretty much operates the entire world. Your TV, your car, you router, your cable TV box, your gym equipment, and all sorts of other shit you own is running Linux and you don't even realize it. Let's also not forget that those of you who have Android phones are using Linux. Android is just another distribution of Linux for the most part.

As for the thread. I do not believe that 3d printing is over-hyped. One area where it helps a lot is in prototyping. It allows companies to rapidly prototype which cuts development costs. What use to take weeks to do, can be a done in a day with 3d printing.

[mum]

Yes, 3d printing will have a more direct impact on industry then at home for that very reason. people will make playthings at home and small businesses will benefit, but decentralizing manufacturing? No, not in any meaningful sense

[Thompson_NCL]

My point was never about suppression. Rather it was about the bourgeoisie being best positioned to aquire patents and material rights. Afterall the one with money wins in the courts. They won't suppress 3D printing but you'll have to buy the rights to print certain things and acquiring the raw material will also come under contract. Real production differs from shareware significantly.

Why would they care about production capability? The money is in the intellectual property, not the manufacturing. Big companies will have the money to employ some of the best designers, but they'll not have a monopoly. Look at the gaming industry; Indie developers are now competing directly with the big boys.

[Dagoth Ur]

All the biggest "indie" games are sold through the major platforms gaming networks usually on the network's dime to one degree or another. Most purely independent games are not known, do not sell well, despite sometimes even being better than mainstream games. But video games are a poor counterpoint anyways as they are inherently artistic. That is there is no way to really get a monopoly on such a thing effectively. Getting a monopoly on the material content/form of a pvc pipe however is very easy to monopolize. And unlike music downloads if we start fucking with major production the law is going to come down on file sharing like a ton of bricks.

Nothing will change except the things you buy you'll generate nearby instead of having it distributed to you.

[Tachyon]

Whether or not this really takes off for general in-home use will greatly depend on the availability of a massive library of 3D models from which to choose from. Think about how many products are used on a daily basis, then realize that there is usually a large variety of that product (different shapes, sizes, features, configurations, colors, materials, etc). If you really wanted to make good use of a 3D printer, then you would need to own a copy of an expensive parametric solid modeling program (SolidWorks, Inventor, ProE, Catia, etc) and then have the ability to actually be able to use it to make a model that is printable. I have a feeling that a large percentage of the population will not be willing to invest that much just so they can print their own iPhone case

[Brother of Karl]

You don't think any company will streamline it in the near future to be as user friendly as an iphone? There's no reason consumer 3d printers need to be complicated to operate.

[sans-culotte]

Well I am genuinely surprised by metal printing after researching it. Still, apart from specific aero or space parts I don't see many useful applications, given the limited need for custom parts, and pretty much no need for custom parts in domestic use. It will never be cheaper to make nails, screws or hinges at home given the massive opportunity cost of a metal printer sitting idle 99% of the time, let alone its fixed cost and operation cost. To produce actual finished goods one would need both metal and plastic printers, time for assembly, as well as needing to buy a ton of other parts that can't be printed. Not gonna happen.
The maximum "decentralisation" to be expected here are perhaps printing shops where you can order a custom part.

Printed plastic will never be superior in quality to injected plastic because of the very nature of the technique - it will always be weaker and have a crappy finish (making it smooth requires extra processing). I actually thought about getting a plastic printer until I saw how s**t its produce looks.

No one doubts that additive manufacturing will become important, it's the hype over being able to produce your own goods that is a silly marketing technique by 3d printer advertisers.

[Tachyon]

You don't think any company will streamline it in the near future to be as user friendly as an iphone? There's no reason consumer 3d printers need to be complicated to operate.

The printers are already relatively user friendly (3D Systems is already selling their printers at Staples). I am talking about the money and skill required to produce usable models. The software is expensive and the time required to become capable of making anything more complex than lincoln logs is long. I just dont think the majority of people will be interested in making those investments.