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Technology

A 3D Printer Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A 3D-Printing Factory (bloomberg.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
A startup founded by SpaceX veterans aims to realize the potential of a technology whose big promises have never quite come through. From a report: 3D printers -- which create objects by layering materials according to a plan sent by a computer -- have gained a reputation for being unwieldy, expensive and slow. There has been more progress on industrial uses, although there, too, major players have fallen into a multiyear funk. Venture capitalists continue to dedicate significant resources to startups promising innovations to fix the technology's underlying flaws. One particularly radical approach comes from Freeform Future, a five-year-old startup based in Los Angeles. The company has raised $45 million so far from investors including Founders Fund, Threshold Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Instead of trying to build a single machine that can print three-dimensional objects, Freeform is looking to turn entire buildings into automated 3D-printing factories that would use dozens of lasers to create rocket engine chambers or car parts from metal powder.

The company, which has never before discussed its approach publicly, says the technique could allow it to make metal parts 25 to 50 times faster than is possible with current methods and at a fraction of the cost. Freeform's co-founder and chief executive officer, Erik Palitsch, spent a 10-year stint at SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace company. [...] Freeform, on the other hand, is creating machines that can fill a warehouse. Its current factory, in Hawthorne, California, used to serve as Keanu Reeves's motorcycle storage facility. (Freeform still ends up with some of the actor's mail.)

Inside, machines shuffle objects back and forth along rapidly moving conveyors, so the system can work on many things at once. Other companies have set up multiple printers in a single facility, but this strategy doesn't improve their speed, it just increases scale by having them work in parallel. Freeform, by contrast, is redesigning the process by which 3D printing can turn raw materials into finished products. In a sense, it's akin to the establishment of the assembly-line process pioneered by 20th century industrialists like Henry Ford. "We have to achieve a state of mass production to open this up to more industries," says Palitsch. "And you simply can't get there with a conventional machine."
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A 3D Printer Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A 3D-Printing Factory More

A 3D Printer Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A 3D-Printing Factory

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  • The article might be interesting... but it's paywalled, just FYI.

  • How does moving parts make it faster, again vs. rows of normal SLS w. robots which ... zip parts around. Hm, there must be something good behind the paywall.

    Additionally for the SLS metal parts I have dealt with you need to keep them in a protective atmosphere or their surface corrodes as well as managing temperature within a certain temperature range. Semiconductor fabs do this so I guess I buy the idea of pods racing around on robots between machines which can align to the partially completed wafer to c

    • Build the whole additive manufacturing line into a recess in the ground like a pool and fill it with a heavier-than-air noble gas like argon.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )
        In addition, 3D-printed parts seem extremely fragile. I've bought some replacement parts that were 3D-printed and they broke instantly when used. Partly bad design (should have been thicker) and also the layers are possible to pry from each other with a modest amount of force. 3D printing is still far from duplicating *real* parts...
        • They do not have to be. The strength of the part between layers is less than across layers, but not extremely. If things are done properly, I think that I saw a number of 70% strength of the "in-the-layer" strength should be achievable, for plastics. The design can also be done with account to the anisotropy of the process. Things like printing speed and temperature are quite important here.
          • All 3D printed metal parts require post-printing treatments to increase their strength to prevent delamination. You essentially stick them in a big kiln or, occasionally, a big microwave oven.

        • That's the one thing that I don't like about 3D printing. In my first year, I have made many things with my 3D printer from ABS and PLA (or PLA+). I have used both with 100% infill (basically a solid structure) and others with varying percentages of infill (different patterns that support the structure, but there are alternating gaps).

          Some structures I have printed function well and withstand abuse. I have made a few props which have held up just fine. I have made structures to support wooden shelves that h

  • Here's a non-paywalled link;
    https://archive.is/EMcLe [archive.is]

    I've watched some industrial sintering machines in action. A powder is raked across a surface and one or more lasers draw a layer. The build platform drops slightly, fresh powder is spread across, and the next layer is illuminated. The machines I saw did work continuously, but the article claims "Typically, the printer has to take breaks because it also gets too hot".

    Their technique claims "18 lasers fire nonstop while conveyors move plates in and out of t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      Sintered metal is often too weak for its' purpose.

      • Sintered metal is strong enough for the many purposes for which it is intended, and that's why they make it.

    • I'm guessing that the lasers undergo the most "wear" when they're turned on or off so that you get the longest service life if you keep them on as much as possible. This is by analogy with incandescent light bulbs, which is why they're most likely to burn out when you turn them on. As to why they need to "take a break," I can only guess that heat builds up in the lasers to the point that they need some time to cool off.
  • The notion that a 3D-printed product is a single part is a false interpretation. Each "pixel" (or whatever you call it) is a part with some risk of failure at the interface with the next, and the idea behind it is just that you could make those parts a lot faster and more consistently than doing it at lower "resolution". But that turns out to not quite be the case. So it's another ambiguous technology, blindly feeling its way forward one excruciating step at a time.

    • Re:Some false assumptions about 3D printing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2023 @05:23PM (#63258093)
      It also seems like the main advantages of 3D printing are mostly ignored: (1) every part can be different (e.g. everyone's hand is different) and (2) the internal structure of the part can be specified and spatially complex. If you are making even 100 identical parts, making a mold is likely going to be a better bet than 3D printing in terms of manufacturing speed and better strength of the final part. However, if you need very light but strong parts, then being able to make the interior of the part some non-uniform, 3D, nontrivial structure is really useful. I wonder if this might be what is important for SpaceX, though nobody seems to say that. You can make things with an internal 3D variable-size honeycomb or other structure, possibly with embedded tubes or other things. Seems like the same advantages would apply for some car parts or other machines where the excess weight of having a volume-filling uniform material can be a big drag on efficiency or you need to otherwise shape the interior of the part in complex ways.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        >(2) the internal structure of the part can be specified and spatially complex.
        That's an advantage over casting, yes, though strictly speaking you don't need a 3d printer to do that. Turbines use honeycomb structures already for the good strength-to-weight ratio.
        Interestingly, there are modern turbines that use single-crystal airfoil blades, which are made with an exotic casting technique.

      • Those are indeed the main advantages of 3D printing, but they highlight the paradoxes of scaling it. Scaling only makes sense when you're making a lot of the same thing or a few things, not being highly bespoke. Especially because the more customized something is, the more complex and unfamiliar the problems with it may be...problems that, once again showing the paradox, can only be solved with either scale or experience with that exact thing.

        It has the exact same evolutionary challenges as high-throug
      • Industrial additive machines are amazing compared to the hobbyist toys. A common use case is to combine several machined parts into one light weight printed part. It is therefore very good for aerospace use.

    • > The notion that a 3D-printed product is a single part is a false interpretation. Each "pixel" (or whatever you call it) is a part with some risk of failure at the interface with the next

      What makes this comment especially stupid is that things like powdered metallurgy and welding both fall under the same broad category of additive manufacturing where the processes are essentially the same as 3D printing, but somehow these methods are just as strong - sometimes stronger - than parts machined from billet.

      • Nothing you just said supports your conclusions. All I said was that some of the touted advantages of 3D printing are more ambiguous than assumed. I didn't claim there is no advantage, nor did I say that the advertised advantages are never true. Moreover, "pretty old and well established" is a direct restatement of the very criticisms you're dismissing: It's well established and yet has categorically failed to displace most of what it was considered to be competing with.

        All it did was add another tool

  • There are 3D printers available at all prices. You can get a very basic one that's not very good for about $100. It only makes very small prints (under 10x10x10cm (or about 4"x4"x4"), and the prints aren't great quality, but we're talking $100 here.

    If you're willing to spend more, $500 gets you an Ender printer, which is considered to be great value for money - with reasonably big print area, ease of use and high quality prints. In fact, because of this, there is practically no reason to spend more for a 3D

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by shoor ( 33382 )

      I'm curious, what about the cost of materials, electricity, and any other operating costs?

      • You can get an Ender 3 Pro at Microcenter for $99. That's generally regarded as the "best deal" in 3d printing right now, so we'll go with that. It also has a 220x220mm build area, so about 8.5in on each side. I truly don't know where the $500 figure came from, you can buy an Ender 3 V2 Neo, the Cadillac of Ender 3s, brand new on Amazon for its retail price of $320US.

        A reel of 1kg PLA, the standard filament, is about $20, also at Microcenter. You can pretty reliably get it for around $10 online, but we'll

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Materials and electricity are not that much really. Most of my prints are not that large (a couple of inches across) and cost pennies in plastic and electricity. The biggest cost is time. Hobby 3D printing is still relatively slow, even when all the tricks are used such as input shaping, core XY, direct drive.

        That said, making a mold for injection molding is very costly and time consuming. For iterating prototypes a sub $1000 3D printer works very well. Very quickly, though, you realize that you need se

  • I have a 3D printer. I use it to create prototypes. It's fairly slow and not exactly what I'd call "cheap". It's kinda ok for a single item because it just ain't feasible to create an injection molding tool for a batch of 2-3 items, so that's its use case.

    How does this translate here?

    I could see the "single item" case, but how is this superior to the old school production of just CAMing it out of a block of metal?

  • With a 3D printer the size of a shipping container anyone could do that.
    Unfortunately, a shipping container doesn't fit in my hobby room.

  • No one buys a 3D printer because it's "cool". They buy them because they are practical and fun. In reality 3D printers are about as "cool" as pocket protectors and wearing suspenders to school.

  • Philip K. Dick predicts the future again.

  • Seems like the optimal solution to making metal items is to use AI for planning the entire series of actions for modern milling machines. The question is how to train the AI.

  • I think 3d printers are working fine how they are, the giant reduction is cost is a good thing. I think they are mainly limited by print size, stability, and material strength, larger prints take longer and are more prone to failure rendering the entire part useless. Improve temperature stability and print bed size and you'll have people printing larger objects that provide real utility. Another limitation is the material you print with, plastic is soft or brittle, make something similar to carbon fiber pri

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