How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
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Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#2We need to stop thinking like everyone needs a "job", like a factory job or being an employee of a huge corporation. Just because 80-90% of the working population does that today, doesn't mean that's always been the case or that it should always be the case. The Internet and decentralized businesses like the ones enabled by 3D printing will help create a lot of entrepreneurs in the future.
People need to think more in terms of how do I use the "cheap labor" (whether by people, or automatized) to create my own business, and less in terms of "let's ban cheap labor to protect our current jobs".
That being said, we should probably expect some new SOPA-like IP laws supported by the big manufacturing companies that will want to "save jobs" and make such technologies illegal.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#3Paper printers today are far from flawless. They consume a good portion of IT time (in companies and for those of us who are the family tech support).
I'm a tad skeptical of a universal printer. The reliability to print anything of a complex nature (beyond simple plastic molds) is a major concern.
Doing this at scale (putting this in each persons home) is a nice idea, I just don't think it's reliable enough.
I hope I'm wrong.
Somewhat related: Some of Vigor Vinge's touch on the problem of the "universal assembler" and how humanity couldn't substitute a universal assembler for a specialist economy.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#4Paper printers today are far from flawless. They consume a good portion of IT time (in companies and for those of us who are the family tech support). I'm a tad skeptical of a universal printer. The reliability to print anything of a complex nature (beyond simple plastic molds) is a major concern. Doing this at scale (putting this in each persons home) is a nice idea, I just don't think it's reliable enough. I hope I…
Also, how do you distribute the basic materials to each home?
How do you print an ipad let alone a lithium ion battery pack without lithium?
You would need a true "universal assembler" convert one element into another. At that point...I don't think you are worrying about a "jobless" economy.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#5I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on.
I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communication and design. But ultimately they won't change our manufacturing process - the materials are too weak for our needs. So we make prototypes out of plastic and then the actual manufacturing run will be metal.
That really points out the problem with these columns that suggest 3D Printers are about to drastically change manufacturing. These 3D printers are only really a manufacturing revolution to people pumping out plastic (or weak powdered metal) products in low volumes (3D Printers are great in the design phase - but a contractor like Shapeways will ultimately benefit the most from that.
Actual manufacturing of products was disrupted far more by CNC control. Truthfully a 3D Printer for all it's fancy tech is just an extension of CNC machining into building up from scratch instead of cutting down from stock.
CNC changed everything. You can CNC machine shapes that would have just been impossible before, on a size scale that no 3D printer today can match. You can use any material, and you replace REALLY SKILLED labor (a machinist) with a machine. That was dramatic. The 3D printer is just small potatoes compared to the change that has already happened over the last 30 years.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#6I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on. I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communic…
Completely agree. I was involved with a startup in the 3D printing space, and the gap between what 3D printing is capable of and what people think it will be able to do is just enormous.
I think the more interesting stuff is voxel printing and some of the advanced machining technology that's being developed.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#7I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on. I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communic…
Great points. The company I work with operates production thermoforming machines to produce plastic containers. Each machine produces over 12,000 units every single hour, 24 hours a day -- that's over 2 million every week, with only one or two labor hours per machine-hour. And our machines are not even that big or modern; if we were to replace them with new machines, we could easily scale to three times that much per machine-hour. Technologies such as this help us design a prototype to validate a product for a customer before building molds, but it would never be an actual production process. Not until it can produce three products per second while matching the low weights per part.
Our tool room already is much smaller than it was twenty years ago, while producing more molds, thanks to the wonders of CNC machines.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#8I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on. I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communic…
> I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on.
There's another problem - the authors of such articles don't understand "real manufacturing". Even when they do work with a 3D printer, they don't understand the gap between what it does and what's "real manufacturing" requires.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#9I've seen this column written about a thousand times. I just don't think any of the authors have really worked with a 3D printer hands on. I'm a mechanical engineer designing products on a daily basis. We have a (really good) 3D printer and pump out amazing models all the time. Our's uses a fairly strong plastic and allows for things like moving linkages and very fine detail. The models are an amazing aid to communic…
Completely agree. I was involved with a startup in the 3D printing space, and the gap between what 3D printing is capable of and what people think it will be able to do is just enormous. I think the more interesting stuff is voxel printing and some of the advanced machining technology that's being developed.
I agree that the future is bright for the technology. I absolutely love the idea of powdered metal 3D printed molds for injection molding. If you can drop down the cost of making a mold by an order of magnitude inject molding of smaller lot sizes becomes economical. I think that really shakes up the consumer product industry because suddenly you can make a new product for 1/10th of the cost as before.
Re: How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
#10Back while I was in undergrad, I interned for the VPs of engineering, manufacturing and sourcing at a US consumer products company. (None of them ever had an intern so I convinced them to reduce risk by sharing me.) Anyways, the company I worked for relied heavily on contract manufacturing in China. I was able to help encourage getting more prototypes printed here in the US for evaluation instead of waiting for the factories to tool prototypes and saved the company a bundle. The company lost a bunch of time and money shipping prototypes back and forth before they could even get to the production sampling stage.
I don't think that 3d printing is going to revolutionize manufacturing in the US. If 3d printing revolutionized anything it will be product design. Empowering designers to experiment and try new things without the fear of having to retool the factory is going to produce some cool stuff in the future.