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How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

3dprinter.net

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Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#21

Post by seclorum »

jbarham wrote: post #18

Forget AutoCAD, use Tinkercad ( http://www.tinkercad.com/ ) which lets you do solid modelling in your browser using WebGL. (I have no association w/ Tinkercad; just think it's very cool technology w/ WebGL in the front end and Go in the back end.)

Forget Tinkercad; use OpenSCAD! (http://www.openscad.org/)

Its the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller! :)

(Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of the OpenSCAD team, and daily watch their efforts to subvert 3D printing - i.e. make it available to all and sundry for a good price using Open Source methods .. http://thingiverse.com/ ftw!)

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#22

Post by seclorum »

meow wrote: post #19
dolbz wrote: post #14

> and there is no nation on earth with the inventiveness found on such a massive scale as in America. Citation needed? This sentence and the next just made me stop reading. It's borderline supremacism. Whether the rest of the article has valid points or not such a sweeping statement can not be taken seriously.

So is this statement : "Creative and industrious Americans will no longer be challenged by the low-cost assembly line workers of Southeast Asia and third world countries." It almost feels like political speech.

Whatever it feels like, the fact remains that the economy is being crippled by cheap plastic crap made on the other side of the planet and shipped - with much cost - to consumers who only play with it for 0.0000001% of the time that most of these things will be sitting there, forever, out in some landfill somewhere.

I say, bring on the 3D printing revolution. First order for my 3D printer: make me a 3D component shredder that spits out more reusable pellets for my printer!

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#23

Post by seclorum »

pittsburgh wrote: post #6
alexhaefner wrote: post #2

I guess I'm not convinced. Can someone explain the utility of 3D printing beyond rapidly building prototypes? Can it really reach scale and quality to do mass manufacturing? And what types of products could not in any way be manufactured with 3D printers? Which could?

3D printing isn't feasible for the the mass manufacturing of everything yet, but it's feasible for certain types of products today, and it is improving. Here are some ways in which 3D printing has moved closer in the last few years: * Stronger materials, such as Somos NeXt resin: http://www.dsm.com/en_US/html/dsms/next.htm * Cheaper materials * BioCompatible materials, such as Med610 which just came out last week: ht…

You forgot http://thingiverse.com/ .. spend an hour browsing that site and you'll see exactly why 3D printing is a concept whose time has definitely come.

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#26

Post by oelewapperke »

pittsburgh wrote: post #8
tjmc wrote: post #4

Breathless speculation penned by yet another 3D printing evangelist with less consideration of material science than your average ant. Wake me up when you know what Young's Modulus is.

I am not the author of the article, just the submitter. However, I'll run with your comment anyway... Tensile Modulus (aka Young's Modulus) is a measure of how stiff a material is. Specifically, it's a measure of how much a material stretches under load. (Diamond has a very high tensile modulus while rubber has a very low tensile modulus.) Ten years ago, people were 3D printing in plastics with a tensile modulus of u…

Well I have two comments to this: 1) there's still very serious limits to what even extremely expensive 3d printers can achieve. Printing a part for a vacuum cleaner that lasts, say, a year ... not in the cards even for expensive devices. (I do agree at some point they may improve to the point of being useful for something other than super mario figurines, but we're talking in 10 years maybe) 2) while this may bring manufacturing back to America, it will actually destroy manufacturing jobs in America, and transport jobs.

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#27

Post by oelewapperke »

aoporto wrote: post #20

The big question: how long will it take for this form of manufacturing to achieve the cost effectiveness of current methods? The bottom line for everyone, including consumers, is cost. Don't forget about quality control. Let's also not assume that we will always be the most innovative. We have to make sure that the current and next generation of students get the quality education they need in math and science to keep…

3d printing doesn't have to match current manufacturing costs to be effective.

3d printing can be done on location, with local materials, 90% unattended. So while materials are going to be more expensive for 3d printers, everything else will be way cheaper :

no transport costs

tiny labour costs

much cheaper design costs (because it will open machine design to massive competition)

much less taxes (no export, import taxes)

much less administration

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#28

Post by lsc »

biot wrote: post #16
ovi256 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you cite is the manufacturing cost. Then you have distribution and retail cost. The huge factories and stores need capital, so financing cost as well.

Even ignoring all that, it cost me more to build my own bookshelf from lumber and materials at Home Depot than it would have cost to buy a nice, pre-made bookshelf from Ikea. Presumably Ikea has factored their costs into the resulting price.

I'm not sure that home depot sells the laminated? particle board used in ikea furniture. If you used unlaminated particle board, you'd certainly come out a lot cheaper at home depot. heck, most ikea desks could be made out of one 4x8 sheet, so even if you used slightly higher quality plywood, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of materials cost.

Yup, for less than USD$8 you get a 4x8 sheet of OSB[1]; I'd bet money that stuff is stronger than the stuff ikea makes desks out of. Now, I dono how much it takes to laminate that stuff nicely like ikea does, but the raw materials for cheap 'engineered wood products' are incredibly inexpensive. Heck, for $2 you can get an 8' long 2x4 that is actual wood. buy two of those and you can build something much stronger than the standard ikea desk.

Now, I'm sure it costs ikea less to build the desk than it would cost you to buy the materials, but just like amazon isn't going to sell you compute nodes for less than the cost of buying and co-locating servers even though it costs them less, ikea isn't going to sell to you at those prices.

[1]http://www.homedepot.com/Lumber-Composites-Plywood-Sheathing...

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#29

Post by dagw »

lsc wrote: post #28
biot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even ignoring all that, it cost me more to build my own bookshelf from lumber and materials at Home Depot than it would have cost to buy a nice, pre-made bookshelf from Ikea. Presumably Ikea has factored their costs into the resulting price.

I'm not sure that home depot sells the laminated? particle board used in ikea furniture. If you used unlaminated particle board, you'd certainly come out a lot cheaper at home depot. heck, most ikea desks could be made out of one 4x8 sheet, so even if you used slightly higher quality plywood, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of materials cost. Yup, for less than USD$8 you get a 4x8 sheet of OSB[1]; I'd bet mone…

The cheapest desktop at Ikea costs $6[1], and that's pre-laminated and everything. I've bought stuff at Ikea before to cut up and use in other products because it was cheaper than going out and buying the raw materials.

[1](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50071170/)

Re: How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing

#30

Post by lsc »

dagw wrote: post #29
lsc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that home depot sells the laminated? particle board used in ikea furniture. If you used unlaminated particle board, you'd certainly come out a lot cheaper at home depot. heck, most ikea desks could be made out of one 4x8 sheet, so even if you used slightly higher quality plywood, you'd probably come out ahead in terms of materials cost. Yup, for less than USD$8 you get a 4x8 sheet of OSB[1]; I'd bet mone…

The cheapest desktop at Ikea costs $6[1], and that's pre-laminated and everything. I've bought stuff at Ikea before to cut up and use in other products because it was cheaper than going out and buying the raw materials. [1]( http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50071170/ )

Ah. I was thinking you wanted to make a desk, not just the top, which you could do with the 4x8 sheet, some screws, and maybe a two by four. (Am I imagining things? or did you edit your original post to say bookshelf rather than desk? it's okay, I edit my posts too; you could also make a bookshelf out of that 4x8 sheet, if your time was free and you had the carpentry skills.)

Even so, the 3' x 2' bit of 'wood product' from ikea costs almost as much as a 4'x8' piece of 'wood product' from home depot. That's more than 5 ikea tables worth of wood.

I think the dramatically increased price (percentage wise, of course, not dollar wise) of the ikea part is in the addition of the laminate on top and on the sides; you can't really cut the laminated particle board to size once you get it, unless you want exposed sawdust-wood, so we are back to manu

I mean, I'm not saying the ikea stuff isn't good; I'm just saying that they, generally speaking, are charging considerably more (as a percentage, not in terms of dollars, and for a $7 item, even if their markup is 4x, well, you probably aren't going to notice.) than what materials cost.

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