Comment by analog31
9 hours ago
There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
If you balked at the idea, then you were the bad guy, or treated with pity for being so out of touch. Usually you got the Kubler-Ross Stages thrown at you.
> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.
Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.
Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
> Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
I do believe that this vision is basically correct, but the implementation of these eager 3D printing enthusiasts was deeply flawed:
There exist lots of designs of really good 3D printers on the internet that are at least partly 3D-printed. So at least a relevant subset of the parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed. The reason why commercial 3D printers are typically not 3D-printed is rather aesthetics and the fact that for large-scale manufacturing there typically exist much cheaper production techniques.
As people by now have realized (and some of these points were told to these eager 3D printing enthusiasts from beginning on), the correct approach to get towards an exceptional "mostly 3D-printed 3D printer" is rather:
- Improve 3D printers so that even more parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed in high quality (e.g. by improving sensors and software to increase precision; make the 3D printer capable of handling engineeering materials; ...)
- Use a 3D printer to produce parts for machines that can be used to produce parts for a 3D printer, such as CNC mill, CNC lathe, pick and place machine (for populating the PCBs) etc.
Both of these aspects are hot topics that people work on.
In other words: Accept for now that many, but not all parts of a 3D printer can currently sensibly be 3D-printed, and invest serious efforts to develop solutions how 3D printing can be used to enable a high-quality production of these remaining parts.
Sure, and that's useful but not revolutionary nor exclusive to 3D printers. You can use a milling to mill a bunch of pieces for a milling machine. You can use a PCB printer to print the PCBs for a PCB printer. A 3D printer is much, much closer to this than it is to a self-replicating machine.
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