Over the last year or more the buzz word in the media as the next big thing for the future has to be “3D Printing”. But if you ask people what they know about 3D printing, as I have been doing, many reply: “Oh, I’ve heard of that, sounds really cool but… what is it exactly?” Or something very similar. This is a post dedicated to those people and everyone else just starting to engage with 3D printing.
Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of something,it’s good to take a step back. So, what is 3D printing and what can 3d printers do? 3D printing covers a range of manufacturing processes — such as filament fusion, stereolithography, DLP and laser sintering among others — that create products and parts additively, one layer at a time. 3D printers, therefore, allow users to translate ideas into reality relatively simply and combine great creativity with, again, relatively little technical know-how. I use the term ‘relative’ when compared with traditional manufacturing techniques.
3D printing — which can also be referred to synonymously as additive manufacturing — offers, in my opinion, the easiest, most efficient and eco-friendly way to make 80% of the “stuff” we need or want! Maybe not today or even within the next five years, but it’s definitely the direction the manufacturing world is taking — and it is moving at breakneck speed. Some of it is visible through the pages of news sites like this one, other work is being carried out behind closed doors, but be in no doubt, it is happening.
When I talk to people about 3D printing, particularly the uninitiated, I tend to use an analogy, it is not perfect, but it does seem to help people to understand the concept of 3printing. My analogy is an artistic one that likens 3D printing to painting compared with sculpting….
A sculptor starts the traditional sculpting process from a big block of material and obtains the final artistic result of his/her efforts by removing great swathes of that material to reveal the final piece. To obtain a sculpture of, let’s say 100 kg, you would easily need a 400 kg block of material, with the excess 300kg going to waste, as it is unlikely that the material can be reused or has to be reprocessed in order do so. On top of that add transport of the original block and transport of the excess.
On the other hand, a painter applies his material — the paint — exactly where he imagined it to be, and in the required amounts, with very little, or no waste of resources.
I like using this artistic analogy because, like art, 3D printing opens doors to creativity. However while creativity is a huge plus point It is not the only advantage of 3D printing, which enables the production of objects that could not be made any other way. Further, in a small-scale manufacturing environment, it eliminates the need to produce the minimum quantity of objects a manufacturer requires, in order to obtain a decent market price using traditional methods. With 3D printing it is possible to produce 1 item or 500 items at the same cost per unit. Although it should be noted that for high volume manufacturing, there are different cost implications. But for designers, entrepreneurs or the guy who has a great idea for a new gadget, 3D printing can prove invaluable.
And, I believe, that anyone and everyone can try working with a 3D printer … the market is ideas! Imagine how many ideas have been left on paper just because of initial costs. Some might have just stayed in the drawer, but some could have changed our lives!
So why is the time right now? Well, there are a number of factors, including increasing capability while costs decrease. And it is also thanks to open source devices such as Arduino boards as well as the increasing expiry of patents. Patents have always slowed down progress ……. that’s now receding into history I believe!
The facts are that some big players are buying new born companies for nearly ½ a billion dollars just to skip the queue. Other closed source giants are cooperating with companies such as the current poster-boy for open source hardware, Arduino.
You often hear that 3D printing is “a new industrial revolution”. It is! But from some aspects it has the entirely opposite effect from the first industrial revolution, which saw people move en masse from remote places in order to work in factories that produced large quantities of goods ……. Now the production capability and efficiency has come back to the individual person. How that will reflect on our society is entirely another story, and is unfolding before our eyes!
From a personal point of view, as a guy who has been living and breathing 3D printing for a while now, working on creating my own space in the market. I can safely say it becomes second nature, once you get to grips with the technology, to think in terms of going to your printer before going to the hardware store. It’s very interesting to see that my own small kids, on seeing a new object in the house, will invariably ask “did you buy that Daddy, or did you print it?” without giving it a second thought.
We can spend endless hours trying to predict what will happen in the future through 3D printing. The truth is that it’s such a fast growing sector, that what we are trying to predict is already happening….. and the future is happening now!
