3-D Printing Grows Beyond Its Novelty Roots (nytimes.com) 44
For 3-D printing, whose origins stretch back to the 1980s, the technology, economic and investment trends may finally be falling into place for the industry's commercial breakout, according to manufacturing experts, business executives and investors. From a report: They say 3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, is no longer a novelty technology for a few consumer and industrial products, or for making prototype design concepts. "It is now a technology that is beginning to deliver industrial-grade product quality and printing in volume," said Jorg Bromberger, a manufacturing expert at McKinsey & Company. He is the lead author of a recent report by the consulting firm titled, "The Mainstreaming of Additive Manufacturing."
3-D printing refers to making something from the ground up, one layer at a time. Computer-guided laser beams melt powders of metal, plastic or composite material to create the layers. In traditional "subtractive" manufacturing, a block of metal, for example, is cast and then a part is carved down into shape with machine tools. In recent years, some companies have used additive technology to make specialized parts. General Electric relies on 3-D printing to make fuel nozzles for jet engines, Stryker makes spinal implants and Adidas prints latticed soles for high-end running shoes. Dental implants and teeth-straightening devices are 3-D printed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 3-D printers produced emergency supplies of face shields and ventilator parts.
Today, experts say, the potential is far broader than a relative handful of niche products. The 3-D printing market is expected to triple to nearly $45 billion worldwide by 2026, according to a report by Hubs, a marketplace for manufacturing services. The Biden administration is looking to 3-D printing to help lead a resurgence of American manufacturing. Additive technology will be one of "the foundations of modern manufacturing in the 21st century," along with robotics and artificial intelligence, said Elisabeth Reynolds, special assistant to the president for manufacturing and economic development.
3-D printing refers to making something from the ground up, one layer at a time. Computer-guided laser beams melt powders of metal, plastic or composite material to create the layers. In traditional "subtractive" manufacturing, a block of metal, for example, is cast and then a part is carved down into shape with machine tools. In recent years, some companies have used additive technology to make specialized parts. General Electric relies on 3-D printing to make fuel nozzles for jet engines, Stryker makes spinal implants and Adidas prints latticed soles for high-end running shoes. Dental implants and teeth-straightening devices are 3-D printed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 3-D printers produced emergency supplies of face shields and ventilator parts.
Today, experts say, the potential is far broader than a relative handful of niche products. The 3-D printing market is expected to triple to nearly $45 billion worldwide by 2026, according to a report by Hubs, a marketplace for manufacturing services. The Biden administration is looking to 3-D printing to help lead a resurgence of American manufacturing. Additive technology will be one of "the foundations of modern manufacturing in the 21st century," along with robotics and artificial intelligence, said Elisabeth Reynolds, special assistant to the president for manufacturing and economic development.
It hasn't been a novelty for quite a long time. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don;t think 3D printing will ever be used for mass production, but for household production of stuff it is great. Things like mugs, coasters, cups, even guns. for self protection eh? Good stuff.
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Agreed. But besides that 3D printing has dramatically lowered the cost and made faster the use of these traditional manufacturing methods by allowing rapid prototyping. Molds are very expensive to make so you want to get it right with as few iterations as possible. Even a small injection mold can cost tens of thousands of dollars to create. 3D printing allows you to iterate a design before sending it off to a mold maker. And for certain kinds of manufacturing (casting) with molds, the molds themselves
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Hmm... I wonder how well 3D printing injection molds would work. If you could streamline the most expensive part of the process that could be a huge boon.
I mean, if you can print a rocket engine combustion chamber, it should be able to handle the mechanical demands of injection molding just fine.
I suppose the surface finish is likely to be an issue though - you really want a smooth finish for those parts to pop out cleanly, so you'd probably still need to follow up with a grinding/polishing phase... and if
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Prusa has a warehouse full of Prusa printers printing parts for more Prusa printers.
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Mass production is important. For example, even die-hard companies like Prusa have moved from 3D printing parts to injection molding. Mainly because an injection molded part is better in many ways than a FDM or SLA printed item, be it strength (no layer lines to separate), a polished finish, speed of making items (inject the molten plastic into the mold, let cool, open mold, eject piece, repeat), and material conservation (other than sprues which may be able to be ground up and reused, all the plastic is
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Speed is certainly an advantage - and injection molding and other types of casting are already additive manufacturing methods with the same lack of waste as 3D printing.
As for strength, Relativity Space is claiming they can 3D print their cryogenic rocket fuel tanks to actually be *stronger* than anything that could be made with traditional methods, thanks to developing custom alloys specifically to work well with their printing system.
Surface finish is still an issue - I believe they grind the outside rock
Re: It hasn't been a novelty for quite a long time (Score:1)
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Also the entry level price has dropped to about $100 (if you catch a sale at Microcenter). down from 6 figures and it is good enough for a skilled maker to make one-off replacement parts a lot cheaper than they can be ordered (if they can be ordered).
Somebody read the Times (Score:2)
3 days ago.
Your experts bring us this? (Score:2)
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Too funny. Have you seen the big 3D printing trade shows lately? For example Rapid+TCT. These aren't hobbyists at the trade shows. These are manufacturing companies. We're talking large-scale, industrial stuff here doing amazing things with all kinds of technologies and materials including PEEK, and even composite materials using carbon fiber mesh, such as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (don't bother watching it, though, you won't find it interesting although it is really innovative and novel.
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It is for hobbyists making miniature models and one-off parts. It has no place in mass production of any kind.
But that won't stop Slashdot spamming it at every opportunity.
That's what some people said about supply chains and on-demand warehousing and publishing just a few decades ago.
As long as you define "mass production" as being "mass" because it's all happening at the same physical location at the same time, then sure.
If "mass production" can also be "mass" because a whole lot of it is happening, but everywhere, in a distributed fashion, then no.
If you want to perpetuate the effects of late-20th century consumption-industrialization, then stick to mass production with its
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Plastic injection molding and metal sand casting are both far superior technologies and always will be.
"3D Printing" is buzzword spam designed to sell cheap robots to hobbyists.
If you have worked with sophisticated automation of any kind (some of which has been around for decades), 3D printers look like the child's tinker toys that they are.
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You really don't know much about how companies are using 3D printing these days, do you? Or anything about commercial 3D printers. It's not a matter of something being superior. These technologies all complement each other and expand our manufacturing capabilities and speed. Watch videos showing off Rapid+TCT exhibitions. Pretty neat stuff.
I have printed loads of useful things (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes I print stuff I could buy but if I go into town to get something it will take at least an hour, cost fuel and there is a chance the shop won't have it. I whipped up a custom cable clip in OpenSCAD recently and printed a few dozen. The electrical box on my compressor was gone so designed a new one with a holder for the capacitor & thermal fuse. Compressor is about 30 years old so just about 0% chance of getting a replacement from the factory.
Soon after I got the printer I designed this hinge [printables.com]. They would cost me about $ 90 to buy over here, cost only a couple of quid to print them myself.
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I've used for a lot of IT and engineering based items. From specialty cases for Raspberry Pis that have a bay for an external SSD and the power supply, to replacement parts, be it for an RV appliance where they don't sell replacement parts... just entire assemblies. There are a lot of small parts that break that can be 3D printed which would be expensive to replace otherwise. Another use was a wiring harness on a RV that isn't protected from road grime. One 3D printed case later, and now it is out of th
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Nice work. Word of advice though, probably best not to put the Toyota logo on it. Potential trademark/copyright issues there.
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Tremendous power (Score:3)
This is such a powerful technology, far more so when you have the ability to design your own models. I have some products I sell, and I have also created multiple models to replace things that were broken (from knobs on my camper stove, to parts inside the carburetor of an outboard boat motor).
For me, as a software developer, I really prefer modeling via code, and I've created all my models in that way. Now, I can understand if it was more of an artistic / freeform type model that traditional 3D modeling software would work better. However for the kinds of things I make, scripting the geometry is much better.
If you're interesting in this kind of thing, here's great open source 3D modeling software to use:
https://openscad.org/ [openscad.org]
You basically use unions / diffs to create your designs from basic 3D primitives.
Perhaps if... (Score:3)
The problem as I see it is that there are a crapton of sub-$500 FDM printers out there but they all suffer from the same problem. You spend more time tweaking the machine and the settings than you do printing stuff. I bought one and what should have been my first clue that the technology wasn't mature enough is the Facebook user group where pretty much every post is "What's wrong with my print?" Furthermore, these machines are fine for printing your D&D figures but are lousy for printing functional mechanical stuff. Oh sure, you can print something for a fit-and-function test but you can't use them as a substitute for an injection-molded part or a CNC-milled part. Formlabs SLA machines are pretty capable and they have enough expertise built into them that you can get good mechanical parts out of them. Still, they're pretty spendy and unaffordable when you want a large print volume. The have an SLS machine too but that's also unafforable for the micro-sized company that needs to make custom parts but is never going to need more than a dozen of them. Going to Shapeways is an option but that's not cheap and if you have to iterate the part, it gets expensive.
Re:Perhaps if... (Score:4, Interesting)
I lucked out. I bought an Ender 3 (original) and it printed very well out of the box. I've done very few modifications to it, certainly no modifications were needed to get it printing well. It's not very fast of course. But I've printed a lot of little circuit boxes, brackets, and fittings with it. Eventually I added a bed probe to it requiring a firmware update, and modifications to the cooling duct but by then I had printed many things successfully. There are a couple of new sub-500 printers on the market now that look very promising with built-in probes and a nice build surface.
I guess many people just print knick knacks off of thingiverse. For me I print things I design myself for my own purposes, mostly practical. Honestly the hardest part about 3D printing is not the printer, but learning 3D design software. Parametric is powerful but there's a learning curve.
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It is extremely useful, once you get the machine stable, and figure out the correct settings in your slicer software.
We were able to fix so many things at home, we would throw away otherwise.
Cap broke on a cookie jar? Design one in OpenSCAD and print it. Of course it does not fit, adjust 0.1mm, reprint, and done. Jar saved.
It is fun, it is useful, but you should be prepared to spend time or (serious money for a better machine)
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Check out the Auroratech channel on YouTube. She reviews printers out of the box and notes if they need any tweaking.
These days there are some models that just work and get good results without fiddling. Auto levelling, settings pre-programmed into the slicer software, better control loops for things like temperature.
If you want really easy then some of the Chinese PCB fabs are offering 3D printing too now. Industrial machines with excellent quality and finish. You just send them a CAD file and they add any
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I hate to point out the obvious, but when you're talking sub-$500 3D printers, you're really talking about the novelty end of the spectrum. Spend $10,000+ and you're *starting* to get into the serious end of the spectrum.
Similar to how if you're talking about sub $1,000 printers, you're really talking personal/office "novelty" printing, while newspapers, magazines, and other "serious" printing gets done on printers that make those office printers look like the toys they are.
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Well, therein lies the problem. The ROI for a five-figure machine is basically never if you're a very small shop trying to print a few parts. The goal isn't to merely add another type of manufacturing to a big machine shop who will charge you through the nose for a few parts but rather to enable the micro-size business to make things that would otherwise be unfeasible. The goal isn't to create more "makers" which tend to build one-off things but to minimize the gap between being a maker and being a manuf
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Yeah. I'm certainly looking forward to the technology maturing though - office-priced laser printers have gotten good enough that smaller print shops have started going out of business, eventually such a thing will probably happen for D printers as well. For now, the good ones are starting to coming into reach of the smaller machine shops. I'm really hoping the "print shop" model bleeds over to 3D printing as well.
Tooling costs are a legitimate cost for most stamping, injection molding, etc. production, a
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Much of that is that a lot of people are just getting in to the hobby and part is people expecting 3D printers to be a consumer appliance when they certainly aren't.
There is a learning curve. 3D printers are tools, not appliances. While very much science and technology, there is also a feel (art) to it.
Sorry what is the news? (Score:2)
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Yeah, must be a slow news day - this hasn't been news for years. SpaceX has been printing rocket engines for over a decade, and Relativitity Space is printing the whole damn rocket.
Modeling is becoming less of an issue - there's an increasingly large library of pre-modeled parts available online. Some free, many more for a price that's still a lot cheaper than doing it yourself if you figure your time is worth at least minimum wage. And a growing number of such models are numerically driven, so that you
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TFA states that it will begin "printing in volume".
Only if there are a lot of 3D printers! One thing they don't do is print fast.
Sure, you don't need a million rocket engines, so it makes sense to print them if it is cheaper but for manufacturing on a larger scale, and not really that large, 3D printing is probably not the way to go.
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They are improving rapidly though - 2D exposure style resin printers can already produce at... at least several inches per hour I believe, regardless of the cross-sectional area or complexity. Which obviously enables parallel printing as well, limited only by the number of items that can fit within the printing volume. And I believe there's work being done to bring similar technology to sintered metal printing.
Simpler extrusion-based printing is obviously far more limited, but even there there's room for
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>at least several inches per hour I believe,
Yep, surely ready for high volume manufacturing!
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I agree, mine don't either. I've heard of some places that do though, and there's definitely something to be said for branching out as the general populace draws increasingly heavily on digital lending instead.
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A side note (Score:2)
As much as we (often justifiably) rag on Chinese manufacturing, there is something to be learned from Chinese 3D printers. Open designs with tech drawings, schematics, and firmware source freely available, multiple sources for the parts, no bulky expensive beige covers obscuring everything and making repairs hard, no ominous labels about how your entire family will die if you take a screw out, etc. Easy to modify and upgrade to suit your needs. Available for $100 and up. No vendor lock-in at all.
Contrast wi