
2011 3D Printing Predictions - ph0rque
http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/12/31/2011-3d-printing-predictions/
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cma
I'm surprised homebrew 3d scanning via kinect (and modded kinects that work at
smaller scales) wasn't in there.

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liuhenry
How did MakerBot get started? Did they commercialize based on RepRap?

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bre
We got started making repraps but decided to move away from the focus of self
replication and start our own thing with the focus of bringing 3D printing to
the masses by making a printer that's cheap, uses as many off the shelf parts
as possible, and that we could produce with tools we had. We had a lasercutter
at NYCResistor and I sat in front of that thing for weeks making the first few
hundred MakerBots. We still strive to make our stuff compatible with RepRap
machines so that folks who don't want to build the whole thing from scratch
can get an extruder or electronics from us and hack it into their built from
scratch machine.

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jonknee
Why is there a 7 week lead time?

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bre
Because parts took longer to get to us than expected and we're catching up on
the backlog of preorders. It may end up being faster than 7 weeks.

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anthonycerra
3D printers are going to do for physical products what frameworks did for web
apps. Personally, I'm super excited because it's going to chop my product
development time into pieces.

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alimoeeny
Really? What do you use a 3D printer for? Last time I checked they were still
imprecise to the point of being useless for real world jobs. What
printer/material do you use?

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mattbauer
I wouldn't say it's useless but they aren't primetime. You just can't get the
tolerances you need out of them yet. The real world is all about tolerances
and non mechanical engineers always forget this. We actually adjust our files
for the 3D printer to get the tolerances closer. In the end, the speed,
material cost, tolerances and finish won't make these printers ready for the
real world in 2011. Sorry guys. And yes I do own a very nice Stratasys 3D
printer and have access to an Exojet too.

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nickpinkston
Tolerance gets less important as you move into the consumer market - surface
finish is far more important.

Sure, snap-fits need to be pretty tight to work well, but do you really think
people will care if their earrings are 0.05" out of round?

The main issue now is really materials and processing cost - it's expensive to
get the materials because they're engineered to work with a machine, and there
are still things like finish quality, color, etc. that need to improve, but
there are tons are good products that can get around these constraints.

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mkramlich
desktop 3D printers are near the top of my list of geek toys/tools I want to
get in the next year or so. i just can't justify them yet financially because
I don't have any real need to do home prototyping of a physical product. but
the moment I do it'll be like, "here comes a tax deduction!"

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dstein
Any predictions on how long until a 3D printer can print a 3D printer?

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bre
Webca did it this year! <http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285>

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steveklabnik
This is a pretty interesting list, mostly because I think they took what
seemed like a 'normal' guess, and stretched it a bit.

All of this happening would be pretty awesome, though.

