3D Printing - The Birth Of Distributed Manufacturing ?

Posted by Big Gav in 3d printing, bioplastic, distributed manufacturing

I saw a demo of a desktop 3D printer today from 3D Printing Systems which I thought was worthy of a brief post.

The printer produces items up to about 14 cm wide in each dimension, using rolls of ABS plastic as the input material (hopefully one day a suitable bioplastic input will be available in the not too distant future). At around A$3,500 for the printer it seemed relatively affordable (industrial scale equivalents cost around $2.3 million). The printer accepts STL format models, so they can be created in Google Sketchup, Solidworks etc.

The advent of cheap 3D printing is appearing in the mainstream media now, which makes me wonder if it is on the verge of takeoff - thus enabling distributed manufacturing of a range of goods (albeit of pretty low quality at this point).

1 comments

TiradeFaction says 9:31 PM

The future of 3D printing has me excited, but I'll withhold my enthusiasm until we see the definite future of it. There was a federal House bill here that (was obviously shot down) was about implementing a national strategy using the technology nationwide to rebuild our manufacturing base. We'll see how that goes in the future.