How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing(3dprinter.net) |
How 3D Printing Will Save American Manufacturing(3dprinter.net) |
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.
I sense some bruised ego and a dash of nationalism, but if that line keeps you from reading the article because you want citations, then I have a couple of suggestions for where you can find them: Google and Wikipedia.
It almost feels like political speech.
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!
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 under 1,000 MPa and they were happy with that. Today you can print in DSM Somos NanoTool which has a tensile modulus of 11,400 MPa. Keep in mind this is a plastic. ( Source: http://www.dsm.com/en_US/downloads/dsms/NanoTooleng_10.09.pd... )
If you need even stronger materials then you should consider using an SLS (selective laser sintering) printer that can build products in titanium, aluminum or steel. Imagine how many ants could safely walk across a bridge 3D printed in any of these!
(it's a misquote, incidentally, but you get the point)
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 us dominant in Tech. Interesting article but lots of assumptions and unanswered questions.
(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.)
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!)
I wonder how long it'll be until companies start suing.
* 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: http://www.objet.com/3D-Printing-Materials/Overview/Bio-Comp...
* The ability to print in more than one material at a time, as shown in these human feet: http://www.objetblog.com/2011/09/21/a-table-of-3d-printed-fe...
* Higher resolution printing, such as the Objet Eden500V which can print detail as small as 0.0006”: http://www.objet.com/3D-Printer/Objet_Eden500V/
Examples of consumer products currently being made with the help of 3D printers include:
* Invisalign braces: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVQq9joOS_4
* Hearing aids: http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/3d-printing-in-medicine-...
* Jewelry: http://www.summerized.com/jewelry/
Things will really take off for 3D printing when printers can simultaneously print in multiple materials like plastic, metal, and rubber, and in multiple colors per part. Until then, you're right that 3D printers will continue to be used primarily for rapid prototyping, but this will change within a few years as the technology continues to improve and the cost continues to fall.
Also related: http://inhabitat.com/3-d-printer-creates-entire-buildings-fr...
Cars- It's true that a Frenchman made the first gas engine car, and that some of the very, very early cars (which were unaffordable and unusable by the masses) came out of central Europe. Nonetheless, it was US innovations that led to cars that were actually adopted by significant numbers.
Airplane- I really don't know what you're getting at here. From the Wright brothers' first flight to the mass adoption decades later, the US lead the way.
Web- The web as we know it started with Mosaic, which came out of Illinois. Even by 1995, the vast majority of internet users and sites were in the US. If one were to be pedantic, Lynx which came out of Kansas could be considered to be the start. I can only assume you're pointing at Tim Berners-Lee, who made the initial proposal for the protocol and a few proof of concept tools. He's an Englishman, but has chosen to do his work in the US out of MIT, which only goes to show the strength of the OP's argument.
I still stand by my remark that being seriously upset by that line in the article is an indicator of being out of touch with reality.
Yes, Ford invented the production line, he did not invent cars.
> From the Wright brothers' first flight
Flight had been going on for decades. There is some evidence that a New Zealander did controlled flight under power first (which is what the Wright brothers are generally credited with), but did not publicise it. Wing-warping was already under trial in Europe at the same time as the Wright brothers; the Wright brothers' innovation was to get to the patent office first. (I don't share people's kudos of the Wright brothers. They got too much credit for what was going to happen anyway within weeks in Europe. They were extremely aggressive patentors and did much to suppress innovation by competitors.)
> Web
Berners-Lee invented the Web. Pure and simple. Other people made tools that used it, but that was not the claim.
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...
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.