I think that we are underestamating the potential I can build a cnc/3d printer for around 600 bucks now. Add the fact we now have printable electrical ink and I think it's safe to say a lot can be done in the near future. Will you print your next iphone I doubt it, but someone with a lil diy skill can do a lot now for example I can rout a pcb drill a pcb and make the plastic case to hold the stuff all from one machine and 3 files I could download on the net. Furthermore nothing has to be made to make money imagine having a few cnc machines and a handfull of files. A buyer picks from a list of say woodworking diy kits that have been made with raw files on your website the cnc cuts the parts they get mailed off. If you could get those files you could easilf copy the entire buisness model having risidual income with low up front costs making physical products The more common these machines get the faster the price will drop cause with raw wood and the right files you can remake most of the cnc machine it's only a matter of time and a new market will open up i mean imagine a 3d kinkos lol

Sure you can. But that's a far cry from being able to print up a functioning car (as was originally proposed when this whole cockamamie subject came up) or even a pocket radio.

I've had an interest in home machining for some time now - but it requires skill to actually produce anything useful, even if you DO have a nice CNC rig, and it's generally not cost effective for anything that can be mass produced.

I don't see 3D printing changing this any time soon except for the simplest of objects. And there are definite limitations on the materials. We're not going to see, for example, vacuum deposited metals on an affordable desktop printer - the vacuum requirements alone preclude it. (How many vacuum pumps do YOU own? I own two.)

As to the idea of the neighborhood commercial facility - how many neighborhood machinists do you see these days? Do you see any? They used to be quite common. The reason you don't see them is that the cost of one-off manufacturing is too high - even with computer control.

I'm afraid this is going to remain a tool for dedicated hobbyists and commercial/semicommercial prototyping for quite awhile, but we're not going to see the technology go mainstream in the foreseeable future. I could be wrong. I'd LIKE to be wrong. But I don't think so.

BTW, printable electrical ink is nice but I don't see it as beeing that much of a step beyond etching your own PC boards, which hobbyists have been doing for 50 years now. It IS a lot more ecologically friendly, but it also requires a substantially greater investment to get started.

Yeah, depending on the technology it's about a 60/40 percent chance that it will happen... Sometimes it can be a 70/30 chance. At the worst it's a 10/90 chance. Still better odds than winning the lottery.

I can name two recent real developed products from the late 90s/early 00s that never made it but should've, one is digital paper which was a xerox parc venture and the other is nano-discs which were like these little tiny metal records with grooves that carried digital information, up to a gig or two I think in 1998. In both technologies, technology advanced before they could fill a use and/or were worse than the technology we had already.

I just personally think that it's way too huge for nanotech to be a "blip on the radar". Too much R&D cash being thrown at it. We haven't figured out a way to defy earth's gravity without using up a lot of energy, so flying cars is pretty much out. We'll be living on the moon before we ever have them.

One thing is for sure we can't continue living the way we are by being extremely crude with our resources. It's more dire than a "oh i hope this goes down" type scenario, because if we don't do something about our resource and energy consumption and soon, we're going down. End of life for the human species.

Despite all the hype 3D printing isn't really nanotech - at least not 3D printing as it's being proposed for everyday use. There are nanotech applications for it but that's not the same thing that's being hyped and it's not likely to happen on a home scale.

Actually, things like 3D printing and home fabrication are a much LESS EFFICIENT allocation of resources than mass production manufacturing. The amount of energy consumed per unit produced is much higher and the amount of waste per unit is also greater in many cases. This might become less important when home fusion generators become a reality for energy production.

You're 100% correct on this, it probably won't be doing anything useful besides plastic cases and circuit boards for at least a decade or more. currently 3-d printers are nothing more than a fancy box where you stick in a and you get b. all of the materials, etc have to be processed off site and likely costs many times more than to send the mesh off to a factory and get it done there.

Beat you too it see my above post... I think it will be interesting to see what goes on. It's more or less simply that 3-d printing is the foundation for trying to explain nanotech in an example because it has uses in that domain and is a model to work from. It's a lot more easier and believable than "nanobots self replicating and eating everything". Laying molecules down from the bottom up, or "printing" is a much more realistic way and easier to control but we are by no means there yet, decades away at least. That's why it's getting lots of attention, maybe it's confusing too many people? In a technical sense, this specific technology actually really "sucks" in comparison to other means.

... no more a piracy option than the "commercial facility" copy machine at the local Kinko's / office supply shop / library...

um not true theres plenty of tech available for me scan an object say a green army man. Feed green plastic in the top of my extruder press print and a green army man will pop out my printer. If it will fit in the box it can be printed in plastic. Including working gears free moving bearings hinges all printed as one piece. That means for hobbiest I could print parts for rc cars robots planes all kinds of things, but where it gets interesting is when you can print parts to build another machine this is where I see the biggest advantage cause that will drive the price down

A green army man is one thing. A motor for an RC airplane is something entirely different. A servo for an RC car is something entirely different for that matter. And an entire car? Fuggeddaboudit!

As I said, it's fine for simple, noncritical objects like coffee cups, green army men, plastic model parts, and even simple furniture. But not anything really complex.

As far as printing parts to replicate itself? Not bloody likely anytime soon.

More on 3-D printing and copyright:

Disruptions: The 3-D Printing Free-for-All - NYTimes.com

More twaddle. As the people responding in the comments section point out quite clearly on a number of points.

I'm amazed this thread isn't totally dead, BTW......

... so we can afford to wait a decade or so before having to worry about the copyright aspects? Isn't that how copyright infringement / enforcement got in the mess it is today?

Naw, isn't the world going to end in 2012 anyhow?
You can blame politics and political agendas for the lack of copyright protection over the last decade... but that's neither here nor there (mainly because if we talk about it, both of us will be "there" -- as in on another forum after being banned from this one, heh)

Actually, when it comes to physical things, the relevant law would most likely be the Patent laws, not copyright.
If it becomes a significant issue, i'm betting my bottom dollar that it will get clamped down a heck of a lot quicker than the music situation (that is.. IF the music situation even gets a clamp to play with). Very least there will be a licensing setup to where patent holders would $$ in on blueprints. As of now it's more of a novelty. Time will tell if it becomes more than that.

Try copying the classic Coca-Cola bottle and see what laws you get prosecuted under. I doubt it'll be copyright infringement.

Correct. It won't be copyright infringement because you can't copyright a physical object. And it won't be patent infringement unless it's a new design of bottle (perhaps a new type of cap or a new material) because patent only lasts a few years.

It would be trademark infringement, which is a whole other ball of wax specifically governing commercial trademarks, and which is pretty convoluted. AFAIK there is no law against copying a Coke bottle for your own use or as a work of art. The law only governs using the bottle as a container for commercially marketed beverages. Or selling the bottle itself as a commercial product.


Blueprints, schematics, and other plans are copyrightable. So it will be possible to copyright the set of instructions that tells the printer how to make an object, although the object itself is not protected by copyright.

As I've said before, I seriously doubt that 3D printers will ever become cheap and ubiquitous enough to be much of a problem to most products, due to the wide range of materials they'd need to handle. Most 3D printers only handle between one and a small number of materials. (For example a printer that usdes plastic as a medium is vastly different from one that uses metals. And ones that use metals are inherently far more expensive - and always will be due to the physical processes involved.) Such printers can produce models of things like motors (either gas or electric), but not the motors themselves. Ditto for electronics and most other complex devices.