3d printing boom ideas thread

[Ron Burgundy]

3D pirating has arrived

http://torrentfreak.com/first-downlo...rrives-120205/

[grizy]

That's ridiculously expensive

[Henry17]

The expense is the issue that can never be overcome. It will always cost several times as much to print something than to mass produce it. The only value of 3D printing will be in items that can not be produced in batches for whatever reason.

[surftheiop]

Originally Posted by Henry17

The expense is the issue that can never be overcome. It will always cost several times as much to print something than to mass produce it. The only value of 3D printing will be in items that can not be produced in batches for whatever reason.

I think everyone is missing out on the entertainment value. There is an ice-cream store near me that has this ice cream sundae robot, it uses that really cheap soft serve ice cream and then you get to choose a couple candies and some super cheap generic chocolate syrup to put on it. It then grabs a cup and moves it under the different dispensing tubes to make the sundae while playing some sort of circus music. Its essentially like the same quality as the 99cent thing at McDonalds. The sundaes are probably 3x as expensive as the place down the street that actually uses high quality ingredients, but the ice-cream robot always has like 5 kids waiting to use it and people even have birthday parties where all the kids come to the store and gets sundae's from the robot. Then all the parents go over to the counter to buy the more expensive specialty ice creams that they had to stare at while waiting in line to use the robot.

[LondonBroil]

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

[dc_publius]

Originally Posted by surftheiop

I think everyone is missing out on the entertainment value. There is an ice-cream store near me that has this ice cream sundae robot, it uses that really cheap soft serve ice cream and then you get to choose a couple candies and some super cheap generic chocolate syrup to put on it. It then grabs a cup and moves it under the different dispensing tubes to make the sundae while playing some sort of circus music. Its essentially like the same quality as the 99cent thing at McDonalds. The sundaes are probably 3x as expensive as the place down the street that actually uses high quality ingredients, but the ice-cream robot always has like 5 kids waiting to use it and people even have birthday parties where all the kids come to the store and gets sundae's from the robot. Then all the parents go over to the counter to buy the more expensive specialty ice creams that they had to stare at while waiting in line to use the robot.

I think you're misjudging just how many people are willing to pay for gimmicky entertainment value of 3D printers.

Yeah, the icecream machine works because it's three bucks worth of pocket change. Heck, Haagen-Dazs costs more than that at the supermarket.

But very few people just throw money around on $100 gimmicks.

[TomCollins]

Plus watching a 3D printer print is not terribly entertaining.

[DMACM]

3d printing will ultimately be cheaper than traditional manufacturing. Rather than cutting pieces out of raw material and fastening them together printing carefully lays material where it is needed. So there is less raw material wasted.

[thebreaker27]

Send bomb virus. 3d printing boom!

[straightaway]

Originally Posted by DMACM

3d printing will ultimately be cheaper than traditional manufacturing. Rather than cutting pieces out of raw material and fastening them together printing carefully lays material where it is needed. So there is less raw material wasted.

Raw material waste is probably a very very small % of the costs for most things manufactured

[thebreaker27]

Originally Posted by Gullanian

I've only seem them print cheap plastic toy things, can they do more? Like things with moving parts?

Best position is to be the leader in sex toys designs.

[DMACM]

Originally Posted by straightaway

Raw material waste is probably a very very small % of the costs for most things manufactured

True. Looks like only 5%.

Able to build models of mind-boggling geometrical complexity from scratch, they dispense with tooling costs. Plus, there’s very little waste. While traditional ’subtractive’ manufacturing processes often remove up to 95 per cent of the raw material to arrive at a finished component, additive machines only use the material they need to make the part.

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-dept...#ixzz1lqgE7s10

[TomCollins]

Originally Posted by DMACM

True. Looks like only 5%.

Able to build models of mind-boggling geometrical complexity from scratch, they dispense with tooling costs. Plus, there’s very little waste. While traditional ’subtractive’ manufacturing processes often remove up to 95 per cent of the raw material to arrive at a finished component, additive machines only use the material they need to make the part.

Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-dept...#ixzz1lqgE7s10

But how many products can they not recycle the waste? If it's plastic or metal, very easy to do so.

[Henry17]

There seems to be some confusion. Yes a 3D printer has less waste but it uses a raw material that will always cost multiple times what the raw material would cost for traditional manufacturing. As such it will always remain cheaper to use traditional manufacturing even with waste being much higher. The discussion here seems to make the incorrect assumption that both processes uses the same raw material and that is not the case.

[DMACM]

Is there any chance that people will be able to recycle the plastic at home? If not I could see them producing a lot of junk and tossing it. If they could remelt down the plastic somehow you could keep recreating toys for kids out of the old stuff that isn't used.