3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%

http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221&CFID=162367227&CFTOKEN=74435751

by joshrule • 15 years ago

123 69 15 years ago

Good to see the Economist covering 3D printing - it's still amazing to me how much most people, even close to manufacturing, aren't familiar with it at all.

FWIW though - the 90% they're referring to is the delta between machining solid parts and printing them. It should be added that this is a rare use-case for 3D printing.

Usually it competes more directly with injection molding technologies that often have better material usage because there is no need for support material - which goes to waste holding up the hollow areas for the types of material-saving lattice structures they're talking about.

Sometimes you can get great savings, but 3D printing isn't a production materials panacea. Let's not even get into how to recycle composite materials (very energy intensive) and photopolymers (you can't).

bobds3• 15 years ago

As far as recycling goes, it's very exciting that you can recycle plastic bottles into plastic granules/filament and use them for printing.

I think we are not that far away from a self contained fabricator that turns garbage into everyday plastic parts you need.

chadgeidel• 15 years ago

It's probably going to take a little more than that, but I've always held that landfills are probably going to be very valuable property in 50 years or so. I assume there are going to be "dis-assemblers" to consume and separate "junk" for repurposing in manufacturing.

It's a little dream I have. :-)

Kliment6• 15 years ago

Well, that's not entirely true. The lattice structures are internal to the object, and substitute for solid infill. Commercial FDM 3d printers use a crosshatch instead of solid fill, and the reprap toolchain has that as well as a number of cool ones like hexagonal infill. So you have lattices instead of solid walls in the microstructure. With powder printers, such as the metal printers described in the article, you can form hollow areas of any shape since the raw material itself acts as support. To get the material out they need to be open on one side, but that is hardly an issue with a design that airy. No additional material is needed. The only case where you need support is for FDM based printing with sharp overhangs. Even this can be mitigated with clever design, such as making overhanging parts with bridges (connecting walls with a stretched layer of material that spans a gap) or teardrops (closing gaps using low overhang structures, like the buttresses on gothic buildings). The main advantage of 3d printing is that it can produce structures internal to the object that cannot be made by any subtractive method, and that it makes production costs linear and design-independent. This is very cool, since it literally costs the same to make two identical or two different objects (with the same build time) and it separates cost from volume. The costs per unit are still high compared to injection or casting, but the tooling costs are essentially zero. And the costs per unit are dropping rapidly, particularly given that the FDM printers themselves are now partially self-replicating

It's a very exciting time to be living in. I have three printers. The first printed the second. The second printed the third. I've made a number of things which turned from idea to design to prototype within hours to days. Then I tweak, hit print again and I've got production. No tooling, no waiting.

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

How much work did it take to create a printer when you already had one, and how many custom parts?

michaeldhopkins2• 15 years ago

Did you design your printers or buy them? You should write this up and submit to HN.

nickpinkston6• 15 years ago

Actually, FDM, Objet, ProJet, SLA, EnvisionTec, SolidScape, an many more use support material that is consumed during the build / post-processing.

Many lattice structures can still be made using injection molding equipment (far cheaper) or starting with a raw material with such a structure: think of aluminum honeycomb.

I agree 3DP is exciting, but we need to get real about what we're trying to achieve - traditional manufacturing engineers are pretty clever too. Not every STL should be run through a nozzle...

FDM is actually one of the worst methods for 3DP manufacturing because it scales linearly - MakerBot et al use this tech because it's the easiest process to build and makes durable parts from common raw materials.

tintin• 15 years ago

Well I'm not sure you could say the same for this example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHgszH0aqI (printing a working flute, multiple plastics at the same time).

podperson• 15 years ago

I was a bit curious about the 90% figure, but a good deal depends on what point in the adoption process we're talking about, e.g.

Use 3D printing instead of milling or whatever for prototype.

Use 3D printing instead of whatever for mass production.

Use 3D printing at point of use.

Simple example: I bought a porcelain teapot a few weeks ago. A few days later we broke the lid. So I bought a new teapot. (The old teapot with the broken lid is sitting on a window sill above the kitchen sink, waiting for glue. A tube of glue costs a substantial fraction of the price of the teapot.)

3D printing could eventually lead to a tectonic shift away from planned obsolescence and disposable culture (which, let's face it, is purely an artifact of mass production).

nickpinkston6• 15 years ago

Yea, I'm very much with you. Our goal (at my startup CloudFab) is that by making things for ourselves - or at least closer to what we want - that it'll mean less marketing driven consumer culture and people will want to keep their self-designed goods.

FYI - we can print in ceramics now - so that lid is replaceable if you've got a file ;-)

jobeyonekenobi• 15 years ago

For me, the point of interest comes from locking down a blueprint distribution model. Everyone can print certain items depending on their access to raw materials/power/specification of fab, but depending on how much they pay for the 'blueprints' will be the difference between generic and premium branding with every tiny difference in between.

marshray7• 15 years ago

Why would someone pay more for "premium branding" on something they print on their own machine?

Granted I don't understand why people pay more for branded clothes either.

wmf• 15 years ago

The point of premium branding is in fact to prove that you can afford to pay more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

iwwr3• 15 years ago

The cheapest professional machines run into $50K unit prices. A RepRap will set you back under $1K, but it's not very useful at the moment.

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

Why not? What are the differences?

steveklabnik9• 15 years ago

Generally, those from the engineering community sneer at the MakerBot and the RepRap. Just listen for the word "tolerances."

Now, they're totally right: the home printers have a significantly lower resolution than the professional ones. But unless you're making professional grade parts, you probably don't care, and they use the same materials. (I'm assuming you're making the comparison to other FDM machines.)

steveklabnik9• 15 years ago

This isn't true, by the way. The uPrints start at $14,900 now: http://www.dimensionprinting.com/3d-printers/3d-printing-upr...

I'm also assuming that you're talking about FDM, like the MakerBot/RepRap. If you're talking about a different process, well, then it's different.

iwwr3• 15 years ago

Thanks, prices appear to be falling steadily.

bobds3• 15 years ago

They come a lot cheaper than that. The biggest cost is the proprietary materials they use, I'm guessing it would easily add up to more than the cost of the printer over time. Servicing costs should also be pretty high.

I've compiled a list of most cheap printers (slightly out of date, I am going to add more soon): http://punkmanufacturing.com/wiki/

As far as usefulness, the open-source printers are not that different from the cheap commercial machines. A well-tuned RepRap should have comparable accuracy. The printing materials are a lot cheaper, as well as the parts (which you can print) and servicing costs. The commercial printers have better resolution, better materials and better software, at least at the moment, but I think that's going to change.

steveklabnik9• 15 years ago

Most of those materials are reverse engineer-able, though. This has a significant impact on the big manufacturer's bottom lines... they derive most of their profit from materials, just like regular printers.

I'll just leave this here: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/

Specifically: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/2009/10/plaster-based-powde...

See how cheap that is? Crazy...

jonhohle• 15 years ago

The biggest cost is probably the manual labor that goes into finishing a part. 3D printers are hardly analogous to the current state of paper printers: all of the technologies require some form of post processing (cutting away supports, curing materials, sanding, etc.).

Most of the discussion I see about 3D printers ignores the significant amount of physical effort you have to put into a part if it will be used for anything (and depending on the method, just to see the part).

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

This claim seem about as believeable as the claim that computers would create the paperless society.

steveklabnik9• 15 years ago

The biggest thing that people forget when dreaming about 3D printers is that it doesn't making something from nothing: the materials have to come from somewhere.

Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard) and we make them small and reliable enough that it's acceptable for normal people (hard) you _still_ have to have a big vat of plastic or whatever lying around, and feed it into the machine.

We've got a long way to go before 'a printer in every home' is reality, if it ever does.

My thoughts: it's like water. A big pipe of raw materials. Just imagine how long that'd take...

Retric• 15 years ago

Reminds me of The Diamond Age aproximate quote "The windows where made of diamond, because as a simple carbon structure it was cheaper than glass".

rbranson3• 15 years ago

I think we are moving away from ownership and towards a more utility/service-oriented society, so I don't think a 3D printer in every home will ever become a reality.

rmc• 15 years ago

Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard)

People won't be designing things themselves, they'll be downloading files and then pressing 'print' on their computer. It's like how people share funny pictures, links get sent around and viewed.

rbranson3• 15 years ago

Perhaps not a paperless society, but computers & the Internet HAVE dramatically decreased the amount of paper we use these days. Just off the top of my head for consumers: Phone books & directories, maps, banking & billing, written correspondence, fax machines, shared scheduling & calendars, media distribution (books, music, movies).

eftpotrm3• 15 years ago

Within the terms that were then understood, they're very well on the way to that though.

The first office I ever worked in, as a summer job as a student, was computerised but used them as glorified typewriters in the main. All the master documents were on paper, punched and organised into lever arch files. Backups? What's a backup? Think back to an old office; row upon row upon row of filing cabinets, carefully indexed. I don't think I've seen that in at least 6-7 years, maybe 10.

I can't remember the last time I found a document where the master copy was on paper. Regularly referred to paper copies are almost exclusively annotated working versions which get destroyed at the end of the process. We circulate documents on paper in some contexts but are equally likely to email them to each other, and that's rising - more often than not, paper is a reference copy for a meeting rather than our master copy.

My employer stopped doing printed payslips and went fully electronic over a year ago. I have paperless billing from two utility companies and could set it up with a third, I just haven't got round to it. I rarely print photos any more. I read eBooks probably slightly more than paper books and definitely read online news rather than newspapers, while magazines are tentatively stepping towards full electronic distribution through both websites and tablet apps. I basically don't send or receive letters any more.

Paper won't go completely any more than cars resulted in the extinction of the domesticated horse, but it seems to me it's heading for much the same specialist/luxury niche in the market.

pgroves2• 15 years ago

>Mr Schmitt says it should be possible for a robot builder to specify what a servo needs to do, rather than how it needs to be made, and send that information to a 3D printer, and for the machine’s software to know how to produce it at a low cost.

This is where I will shamelessly plug my startup, DesignByRobots. The overview of the technology is here: http://designbyrobots.com/2011/01/17/first-post/

pgroves2• 15 years ago

sorry, server went down. google cache here: http://bit.ly/gPjVr9

3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%

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