

Why 3D printers won't go mainstream - replicatorblog
http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/205-The-Singer-problem.html

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trapper
The arguments presented are really off-base. The idea of a 3d printer is to
find a model on the internet for free (or $) press print and use the "thing".
Very, very simple.

Sewing machines were completely different. First, you had to get a pattern.
Patterns weren't cheap and weren't easily available. There was no decent
distribution mechanism for patterns, which is half the problem. Then you had
to learn how to sew. Then you must collect the materials. For each garment,
you would input time.

Tell me how these two models are anything alike? And how could a person from a
3d printing company not get it?

~~~
replicatorblog
I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a
model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized"
innovation. e.g. people can improve designs of physical object just as they
can work on OS code. For this to be a reality it will require people to
develop a strong sense of mechanical design and fluency with CAD software.

Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics.
To make an object of any complexity you would need to gather electronic
components, perform assembly, which may require secondary skills like
soldering. Given the state of the art and development roadmap homegrown
manufacturers would need to sand and paint the output of the 3D printer to
achieve a "commercial" finish and tht requires time and training.

At a high level I think the comparison is apt. It is fairly easy to learn to
sew (as easy as learning HTML, for instance) but we still do not have a
movement of homegrown tailors on the scale of amateur web designers.

~~~
jerf
"I disagree, for some the thought with 3D printers is simply to download a
model and hit print, but many others see it as a path to "democratized"
innovation."

How are those opposing forces?

I am surprised to read so many comments and see nobody articulate what _I_
thought the 3D-printing idea was, which is that it will bring open source to
the physical world. No more, no less.

You don't need a degree in mechanical design to use an open-source-powered 3D
printer anymore than you need to be a programmer to use open source, with
roughly the same capabilities and tradeoffs. Most of the rest of the problems
cited in this discussion are supposed to be solved by automation; for
instance, I can _easily_ imagine how to help people stock up on raw plastic
stock with arbitrary degrees of customization, that's not even remotely a
challenge.

"Even if you just wanted to hit print, you can currently only print plastics."

Considering that 3D printers only barely exist today, basing your skepticism
of the concept around only the progress that will be made in the next 5 to 10
years is an odd position to take. (And I feel I'm being generous when you
explicitly say "today".) There is nothing fundamentally challenging about
integrating electronics into a sophisticated 3D printer; it's only engineering
of the type open source does every day. We could make a pretty decent pass at
a generic electronic loadout today and it will only get easier over time.
Already we see full Linux machines barely larger than the plug they attach to.

In fact, it's not even that 3D printers will be "like" open source, the hope
is that it will _be_ open source. 3D printers are just another hardware
peripheral, hardly different in principle from 2D printers or graphics cards
or audio cards or any of the other myriad bits of complicated technology
already attached to computing power. Trying to separate the "3D open source
community" from the greater open source community would be as futile as trying
to separate the "3D graphics open source community" from the greater open
source community; oh, there will be specializations and such but there's no
way you could produce a criterion that cleanly separates each and every
project into either "3D" or "not 3D", the way you can separate "open source"
and "not open source" (for a suitably well-defined definition).

~~~
replicatorblog
Jerf, a couple points:

1\. How are those opposing forces? The first statement would be me selecting
an item out of a catalog and printing it as a designer intended, so a
traditional ecommerce system, but with no delivery, just on demand
manufacturing. The second would be more of an open source model, but
customization could be limited through DRM.

2\. I didn't say people would need to have degrees in mechanical design, just
that they would have to become skilled in it. For most people this is going to
take an investment of hundreds of hours.

2\. I think you are underestimating the "ease" that plastics for manufacture
can be lined up. I think people are lulled into a sense of ease when it comes
to 3D printing because we have seen such dramatic improvement in info tech and
desktop printing. In the case of software your raw materials are 1 & 0's with
2D printing you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. Moving into atoms
the variety expands incredibly quickly. Materials all have quirks and the
process that manipulates them further complicates the matter.

3\. With electronics you are still going to face issues. First what is the
"ink cartridge" analog for electronic components? How do you handle the
regulatory issues? UL, FCC? I'm sure it can be done, its just not that easy.

4\. 3D printing is a 20 year old industry. It faces long development cycles
and requires significant and costly improvements in material science. Thanks
for your generosity, but I will stand by my skepticism.

In closing I don't doubt the rise of "open source" manufacturing. I just don't
think 3D printing will have major role in it. You seem to have confidence and
a vision for how to make 3D printing ubiquitous. I hope you help move the
state of the art forward.

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sbaqai
The 3D printers we have in the architecture school print starch and ABS
models. They cost around $3-4 per cubic inch, and one method of reducing cost
is to create hollow volumes instead of solid ones. But then they're reduced to
visual study models, rather than any potentially functional ones.

I'm interested in seeing how the print materials will evolve. Current
materials are great for prototyping and generating forms, but materials like
starch are very brittle, and anything less than .125" thick will usually
break. It would be great to print models that are not only functional and
durable, but viable as end products.

A lot of attention is on 3D printing, but that's connected to a larger set of
technologies that make up "digital fabrication," which includes laser-cutting
and stereolithography, etc. Laser-cutting is as significant as 3D printing, I
think, as you can design interesting 2D patterns as well as folded surfaces,
that can be aesthetic or even structural.

For one of my projects this semester, I created a nice set of computer
speakers for my macbook, out of foamcore(!). I lasercut the foam to create the
housing for the speakers, and encase the circuit board that had the power and
volume controls. The next step is to buy higher-end speakers and create the
housing out of high-grade wood for better acoustics.

Anyway, the point is, you can make a lot of interesting things with digital
fabrication.. I don't think it'll be as ubiquitous as inkjet printing, but
more similar to the structure of Software Development Kits, where industrial
designers will facilitate co-creating your customized products. I can imagine
separate teams of designers making customized laptop chassis, medical
equipment, cell phones, etc...

~~~
replicatorblog
sbaqai, you are absolutely correct. 3D printing gets a lot of glory, but it is
just one of the amazing technologies changing manufacturing. Laser cutters are
another great example, but so are the home use plotters like the CriCut that
put mass customization in the hands of anyone with $300.

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replicatorblog
Just FYI, This post was a continuation of a "3D Printing Smackdown" between
the Replicator Blog (<http://is.gd/ojHl>) and the always entertaining
SolidSmack Blog (<http://is.gd/ojHB>) on the likelihood of 3D printing
reaching the mainstream consumer.

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mhb
This is only a temporary concern due to the cost of current 3D manufacturing.
A big, expensive machine is needed to provide the mechanical stiffness needed
to produce something of a satisfactory resolution at a reasonable rate of
production in a useful sized work envelope. These are the same factors which
drive the cost of lathes and mills. So if you're willing to accept very low
resolution outputs produced slowly, you can get that today.

Once molecular manufacturing is viable, this conversation is over so there's
not much point in getting too agitated about precisely when the size, cost,
resolution and work envelope of 3D printers makes it more appealing to have
one in your house or to have Shapeways print it and mail it to you.

~~~
mhb
Just as a point of interest, this is a model of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
which I designed using Rhino and had printed at Shapeways.

<http://www.shapeways.com/model/13639/fsm.html>

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jpwagner
Why does anyone _want_ a 3D printer?

Graphic 3D modeling is easy and useful and I have to guess (based on the tools
and practice people get in this day and age) that generation to generation
people are improving at picturing abstractions/descriptions.

Is this tool even necessary anymore? Isn't it a leftover "futuristic" device
from the 20th century?

~~~
gollywog
3D printing isn't just used for making models, there's plenty of other
applications.

There are times when a personally customizable object is more suitable than a
mass produced one, and that is what 3D printing allows.Eg, a small plastic
component breaks, its better to just fab the little part up than replace the
whole thing.

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sho
I don't get this article at all.

If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will
never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use
sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely
spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of
technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in
current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot
of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless
plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve,
massively?

It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The
source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more
important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever
tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half
the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make
myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern
from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from
anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something,
so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably
higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can
just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot.

There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly
generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans
and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it
is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be
produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their
own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't
available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely
available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from
that too much.

But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's
supposed to cover _everything_.

No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now
we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone
know someone who _doesn't_ own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to
feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to
print. Is that just for nerds?

When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby
shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your
computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print.
Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time
- will be built. How is that not going to be popular?

It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty
surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand
manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable.
This guy needs to think more long-term.

~~~
froo
I've got a unique perspective on things as I've looked into both sewing AND 3D
printing for different hobbies. Sewing as a young kid, 3D printing as I got
older.

As someone who owned and learned how to use a sewing machine at the ripe old
age of 10, I can't help to find fault in this guy's argument.

Admittedly I was building Rokkaku's, Speedwing Stacks and Parafoils out of
ripstop nylon and carbon fibre (well, the parafoils didn't use carbon fibre),
but that's not the point.

I recently looked into 3D printing for producing components for another hobby
of mine (tabletop wargaming) and the fact is that it is stupidly expensive at
the moment in terms of both purchasing a machine or getting someone to print
for you. I ended up just learning to sculpt and scratchbuild with polystyrene
card.

Now to address some of his points.

    
    
      1. when someone develops a 3D modeling application that anyone can use and many can master
    

<http://www.blender.org>

    
    
      2. when someone develops a post consumer recycled 3D printing material
    

I'm fairly sure you can recycle acrylic and print with acrylic, so where's the
disconnect there? My chemistry isn't up to scratch so can someone please
clarify?

    
    
      3. when printing metal and circuits becomes cheap    
    

Got me there, I never researched printing either of these things, so I can't
comment.

~~~
theotherjimmy
I will clarify 2 for you; yes, my school has two 3d printers. one uses
acrylic. both can't print more than a 15cm by 15cm by 10cm object, and both
are huge. secondly, blender was a bad chioce; but I can't think of a better
one off the topof my head.

~~~
froo
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, how is blender a bad choice? Have you
actually sat down and tried to use it for an extended period of time?

I learnt modelling under 3DS max, purchased and worked on a copy of Maya 2008
and only recently have switched to Blender to work on a different project
(mostly to try and prove a concept)

While Blender does have it's own nuances (eg, the menu's change based on
context) it isn't any worse than the other tools in the case of workflow for
model creation. Nothing overly noticeable anyway. In fact, they advocate
learning and using mostly keyboard shortcuts which is handy.

However on the animation side (different kettle of fish understandably) it has
a vastly superior workflow and I can produce content at a faster rate, which I
would estimate to be 2x faster?

But really, the difference in price between Blender (free) and Maya (starts at
$2k per license) and many of the other Autodesk (Autocad starts at $4k, 3DSmax
at about $3k) the difference in price is astounding. Even Zbrush which is a
fairly artist friendly tool starts at $600

Besides, Blender is open source. If you don't like something in it, change
it...

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ftse
You could make the same argument regarding typewriters and word processing
software. I would think many more copies of word processing packages are in
active use than was ever the case for typewriters. Word processing is several
orders of magnitude easier than typing and as a result it's an incredible
success. If a 3D printer allows you to pick a design from the web, click on
the 'fab' button and start using your new product within the day, expect them
to sell like hot cakes when the price drops.

