Comment by muvlon
21 hours ago
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.
> You can use a milling to mill a bunch of pieces for a milling machine.
Now that CNC mills get more affordable, people are starting to get vocal about their visions of a self-milling CNC mill. :-)
A classic manual Bridgeport mill, a foundry for making castings, a heat-treating furnace, a steel planer, a lathe, a drill press, a grinder, and a supply of steel is enough for a master machinist to reproduce all that. That's what was used to make machine tools in the first half of the 20th century.
... and now work on
- how these machining processes can be automatized, and
- how the cost, space requirements and noise levels for these machines can be reduced so that every ambitious maker can have them in their apartment
Voila, the start of a home manufacturing revolution ...