Three-dimensional home printers:

More importantly, prices for 3-D printing machines have been falling rapidly, reaching $20,000, and the day is foreseeable when they will fall below $1,000 and become home appliances, says Phil Anderson of the School of Theoretical and Applied Science at Ramapo College in New Jersey.

The results, he warned, could be economically "disruptive."

"If you can make what you need in your own home quickly, then manufacturers become designers, with no need for factories, warehouses or shipping," Anderson told LiveScience.

Given the drawbacks discussed in the article, I think that this is likely to be a gradual transition, that will allow time us to adapt.

http://www.candyfab.org/
http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Both of these rock. The RepRap people have as a goal making the entire machine self-replicating. (Though they haven't had any serious ideas on how to make new stepper motors or the chips.) The non-reproducible parts list is already below $1000, but the plastics they're focusing on (while excellent for structural parts) are expensive on a per-pound basis.

The CandyFab people are using... sugar. And (IMNSHO) they have a tremendous amount of potential improvement in the heating arrangement left to go. Sugar is extremely cheap per pound, and reasonably firm. And it could be used for lost-wax, or whatever.

On either the Moon or Mars, seals and gaskets for airlocks and the like (a number of current model spacesuits use rear entry) will face robust threats from abrasives.

The ability to fabricate new gaskets (and possibly use re-cycled old gaskets as part of the feed stock) will be immensely valuable.

If this becomes a real at home viable technology, people will just use it to create robotic mates. That way you can program out the in-laws during the fabrication phase.

I didn't realize we were quite this far along in this technology. It will undoubtedly be disruptive of the factory based industrial economy, just as factories were disruptive of home based manufacturing two hundred years ago. There will be no stopping this however. If the first home versions of these devices are available withing ten to fifteen years, then withing fifty years they will have revolutionized our society, just as telephones, automobiles, televisions and computers all did within a similar timeframes. This is going to be fun!

Just like inkjet printers, the manufacturers of would sell you the machine for a pittance and then stiff you on the raw materials, which would have to come from the manufacturers or the machine would reject them.

Of course, there would be bootleg materials, but these would invariably damage the machine and produce shoddy copies.

I wonder how the First Amendment will be "reinterpreted" to deal with plans for gun parts. (Guns, while requiring strength, are remarkably low-tech. Some designs don't have tight tolerances and those that do were built with hand-fitting in the past.)

FWIW, semi-autos are more complex than full autos. However, both can be simpler than revolvers.

Just think of the scope it will provide for bad taste.

I am curious as to the limitations.

The application I have in mind is model trains or perhaps model airplanes. I wonder what the capabilities are for making small part because my particular interest is in working suspensions of tilting trains; the model airplane people have similar requirements for small hinges and bearing and bell cranks and the like. And if we are talking model airplanes, we are also talking mini-RPV's or other autonomous vehicles or robots.

One technology I had some excitement for is the 2-D laser cutter, but that too has limitations. There are limitations on the plastics that can be safely cut or cut cleanly instead of turning into goo or a deformed part, thick materials get cut somewhat out of square owing to the direction of the laser beam relative to the cutting space, the cutter can make scribe marks or cut channels but it takes some tinkering with laser power settings to get desired results.

I have one of these in my home - the Dimension BST 1200 so maybe I can answer your question, Paul. At least this machine makes parts by spitting out plastic which hardens as soon as it leaves the nozzle, essentially. Parts are fairly accurate to the desired size and shape - but minimum realistic feature radius is about a millimeter, and you can't really build parts with tiny, intricate details. Perhaps with a SST this would be possible, though. (The BST uses break-away filler, while the SST uses dissolve away filler).

And yes, the machine is cheap but they require you to use "cartridges" of plastic only available from the manufacturer...

Fun stuff, though - and perfect for getting a rocket engine prototype in your hands!

There's already a tool called the "CompuCarve" available at Sears (I have no connection to Sears), which I believe is a relabelled "CarveWright". I'm not buying till the price comes down below $1000, but it seems to be a computer-controlled router, capable of elaborate carvings in wood or plastic. I was thinking one could make a plastic negative mold and use it for casting all sorts of parts.

There are also websites like Big Blue Saw and Ponoko where you can upload a design for flat objects and they'll cut them out and send them to you. All very interesting.

What's the least expensive EDM machine these days?

Competition will drive total cost of ownership to the marginal cost of the printer and the ink. Things start to get interesting when the price of the copies start to be cheaper than the price of the originals. It will be a lot like computer program copyright infringement in the 80s and audio and video copyright infringement these days.

I am looking forward to home-built pharmaceuticals.

Here's a naive question. How do you handle heat treating with metal parts made in one of these machines? Is it no longer necessary, because you can now produce the qualities that you need in a part, without any post-production treatment?

"I am looking forward to home-built pharmaceuticals."

Heh, yeah ... once we get desktop molecular manufacturing, we'll not only have home-built pharms ... we'll have operating rooms where they'll create entire living organs, built with your personal genetic code, ready for transplantation.

Jonathan, the short answer is: You don't.

The majority of the methods that are even vaguely in a reasonable price range rely heavily upon the properties of the material they're focused on. So they don't tend to support a variety of material just yet. Those that do support a variety of material tend to only support a certain _type_ of material. Like plastics, or woods.

There is a fair amount in overlap of the crucial pieces of the 'printer' though, in that you need decent XYZ control. So eventually the methods may combine - allowing layers of different material, etc.

But, that still doesn't handle the problem of making, say, spring-steel or an actual katana. That's more than a little way off IMNSHO.

Remember the move of mfg out of the US and offshore? Expect within the next 20 years to see local auto-fab machines begin to eliminate the 3rd world cheap labor advantage with 'software' teaded for big bucks. In the 2030s, custom build lots of different things you want.

Reminds me of the wag on Slashdot who sat through one of those commercials at the movies warning people about downloading music and asking, "You wouldn't steal a car, now, would you?" to which the dude yelled back at the screen "I would to, if I could download it!"

I've been interested in this for a few months. It's on my top ten list of things I'd like to do if I had time and money.

There's also
fabathome.org

I think the big distinction between fabathome and reprap is that reprap is trying to make it so you can build another reprap with the reprap, while fabathome is simply trying to make a 3D printer without any self replication aspirations.

I'm wondering if I should work with one of my kids who's interested in mechanical engineering to do this, possibly as a future science project. (He's 9 right now, so he probably won't be able to go it alone quite yet.)