Foam printer makes floating foam shapes

I watched in awe as wondered, "why haven't I thought of this before?"



(Via Boing Boing)

Classic cars for the masses: you don't need to be Jay Leno to own a Bugatti

Classic cars for the masses. Here's Jay Leno describing how he reproduces hard-to-get parts for his classic cars by using a 3D scanner and printer. By extension, you might one day be able to own a (cloned) Bugatti on a budget, by just 3D-printing a design downloaded from the internet.

 

One of the hardships of owning an old car is rebuilding rare parts when there are simply no replacements available. My 1907 White Steamer has a feedwater heater, a part that bolts onto the cylinders. It's made of aluminum, and over the 100-plus years it's been in use, the metal has become so porous you can see steam and oil seeping through. I thought we could just weld it up. But it's badly impregnated with oil and can't be repaired. If we tried, the metal would just come apart.

So, rather than have a machinist try to copy the heater and then build it, we decided to redesign the original using our NextEngine 3D scanner and Dimension 3D printer. These incredible devices allow you to make the form you need to create almost any part. The scanner can measure about 50,000 points per second at a density of 160,000 dots per inch (dpi) to create a highly detailed digital model. The 3D printer makes an exact copy of a part in plastic, which we then send out to create a mold. Some machines can even make a replacement part in cobalt-chrome with the direct laser sintering process. Just feed a plastic wire--for a steel part you use metal wire--into the appropriate laser cutter.

Fab at Home, Open-Source 3D Printer, Lets Users Make Anything

This 2007 video from Popular Mechanics, portraying the winners of that year's Breakthrough Awards, says pretty much what I've mentioned in this blog's first post about the future of phone manufacturing:

We've shown that you can make more than just a cellphone case. You can print out transistors, you can print out batteries... So you can print the whole cellphone in the future. This is a way for people to become inventors of technology rather than consumers of technology.

3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution

A great overview of novel uses of 3D printing applications, from The New York Times:

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.

These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding.

A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.

Death to centralized manufacturing, long live 3D printing--or why Apple should venture into printers

A blog needs a manifesto; hence the title. I believe that 3D printing will bring freedom to the masses. 3D printing, although still in its infancy, has the potential to transform the world we see around us.

To the uninitiated: a 3D printer "prints" physical objects by depositing layers of a mallable material, such as plastic, just like an inkjet printer prints a pattern on paper. You can print a plastic cup, Michelangelo's David or a working prototype of a jet engine--anything that has a 3-dimensional shape.

So imagine this: suppose you are building an awesome lego set and you miss a few pieces. Instead of ordering them through Lego.com, you download the designs for the lego blocks you need from a fan site, buy a cartridge to go into your 3D printer, put both into said device and --after a little while-- you have your own lego blocks. Why not alter the design so that your blocks can attach not just to lego blocks, but to K'Nex blocks as well?

OK-- right now the described scenario would be expensive and you will not end up with the right kind of plastic (color, texture, toughness etc.). Also, Lego will sue you if they find out. But you will have your missing lego blocks almost instantly without waiting for the delivery man.

Things are moving fast. Shortly, you will be able to use more materials and go into more elaborate designs. You could obtain a printable design for a mobile phone, get the required raw materials, and you have a working mobile phone coming out of your 3D printer. It costs what the design and materials cost. No shipping cost. No labor cost. No more waiting for your order to ship. No packaging. If it breaks, you make a new one (you might even be able to recycle your old one without too much loss of material). Want a larger battery? Download a design with a larger battery or make your own.

With some exceptions, 3D printing could very well be the death knell for centralized, large-scale manufacturing industries, that require capital and labor to be amassed into large concentrations in order to make a competitive consumer product --a practice that is essentially unchanged since the 19th century. Moreover, they will only deliver one type of product, that has been designed to reflect the average needs of a very large peer group-- no modifications suited to your specific needs. 3D printing can change that.

So, with this in mind, replace "phone" in the above paragraph with "iPhone" and you know that Steve Jobs is going to have a problem in the long run.

Actually, he is already part of the problem in that it doesn't require that much centralization and manual labor to produce his (=Apple's) products. For example, the iPhone is produced without much human intervention--only the final assembly takes place in China at around 1/100th the cost of the sale price. The body of the MacBook Pro is cut out of a single slab of aluminum -- a sort of reverse 3D printing. It costs less material, improves quality and can be done entirely by machine. Also, the aluminum that is removed from the slab is fully recycled, eventually finding its way into an uncut slab again.

In the end, however, it is still cheap to have those machines and operations in one big place. And it is cheap to have them in a low wage country such as China, never mind that its parts come from all over the world. Nevertheless, things are changing. Chinese workers are demanding increasingly more pay. Transport fuel has gone up steadily in the past decade. The flow of consumer goods is geared to just-in-time manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing--any flaw in this well-oiled machine will turn a profitable enterprise into a loss maker. An iPhone crossing the Pacific is an iPhone unable to be sold, and if the ship's captain decides to go half speed because of high oil prices, it's not going to be sold for an additional week.

So why not move iPhone manufacturing close to the market? This is where 3D printing steps in, and please allow me to fantasize a bit. If/when 3D printing becomes versatile and powerful enough, anything physically imaginable can be printed from the bottom up -- no more assembly, no more parts from 3rd party suppliers, no shipping halfway around the globe. All that Apple has to do is to set up a few acres of industial plant in the US (or wherever the market is), drop as much 3D printers as demand requires, turn on the lights, pour in the goop, and make sure iPhones, iPads (or, by that time, MacPad Pros?) come rolling out. UPS delivery the next day. New product? Upload the new design, the printer won't mind. Demand up? Add more printers. Demand down? Switch some off.

Apple already has a history of doing things themselves, or making things exclusively theirs--buying intellectual property, closely integrating hardware and software, developing their own processors, selling preliminarily from their website or highly visible Apple stores, creating a closed platform for apps, and so on. Apple wants to control everything connected to their business. So why not manufacturing as well?

Ultimately though, if a thousand printers can make lots of iPhones, a single printer could make an iPhone as well. So Steve Job's real problem starts when 3D printers become so advanced and cheap that Apple's manufacturing capabilities are matched by snot-nosed 15-year-olds with one of said devices in their room, paid for by either a paper route or Santa Claus. (Somehow I think Santa will outlive paper routes.) Then, lots of late nights, Coke cans, forum discussions and reverse engineering will do its work and --save perhaps for the chipset?-- anyone can build an iPhone just as much as anyone can write a book or start an online business. Or better, anyone can modify an iPhone. Maybe you want it to have Lego knobs and holes?

It will take a while before 3D printing truly takes hold, if it will happen at all. And as the inkjet printer didn't put publishers out of business, so the 3D printer won't replace traditional mass manufacturing entirely. But it will set off a revolution that keeps many a man awake at night--Chinese factory workers and technology CEOs alike.

IPhones for everyone! Long live the proletariat!