But a great business idea would a small shop, that owns one of these and sells its use.
You send them your plans, come in the next day and pick up the part.
It would be like a neighborhood factory, that manufactures anything you want.
It can build a 5x5x5 inch cube, but at 1$/cubic inch it would cost you ~125$ to do so. Depending on size and tolerances I think it would be an excellent way to prototype things like mice, but it's still far from cheep to use.
"... But a great business idea would a small shop, that owns one of these and sells its use. You send them your plans, come in the next day and pick up the part. ..."
If you have taken a classes in polymer chemistry you will have fun choosing the materials, the properties of those materials & associated costs when you choose to construct your "thing" ~ http://www.shapeways.com/about/material-options
I had a friend that used to sell these - they were going for about 30k each; unfortunately they didn't sell enough so had to stop. He told me about a woman who runs a business making busts of people's heads.
Its not quite "The Diamond Age", but I still think it is really cool, especially from a hobbyist perspective. Just think about all the stuff you've wanted to build, but could not because it would have required both access to a a workshop and the skills to use the machines there properly.
Well for someone wanting to prototype something, it might be a lot cheaper to buy one of these than buy the equipment needed to create a prototype out of wood.
I mean the fact that it can make a cylinder is great. I mean the only good thing about prototyping with wood is that a wood lathe is relatively cheap due to them existing for centuries.
Buying a small wood lathe and chisels would be relatively cheaper than this 3D printer, but it would take a lot more skill and talent to create some of the models you can see on the shapeways site.
I would like to know what temperature some of the 3D modelling materials melt at as it would make it easy to use for casting of metal models. I mean if the stuff melts at 100 degrees, you could just build the cast and melt the plastic out just like using wax. If this was possible, it's just easy to imagine the uses for turning a good prototype into a final product. It's like if you design a good model, just build the cast pour in the metal and there's something to sell. Like if you get this on a large scale imagine what could be done for a cast-iron furniture business. Instead of hours spent sculpting a model and then building a cast off it, you make a design and reuse it repeatedly. For the convenience of printing out the model it would save a lot of time and to say I saw a simple (very simple) cast-iron gate selling for around $1500, you'd be able to absorb the $200 for making a new model every time.
Love the idea the CEO said about manufacturers allowing people to download files to print out objects to repair broken ones. No more waiting for a part to ship!
This completely shifts the way 3d printers and the industry works. The price for most of these START at 18k, but really cost 50k. There's been a lot of advancements in this area, including the open sourcing of schematics and software for the technology.
Problem with this company... its vaporware. They've been talking things up and "launching" for quite a while. I hope they do launch though, and soon, because it will be a winner.
Think $5K is too much? Just wait until you get a dozen services to print what you want for cheap. Fab is overrated and underrated at the same time. We're not going to make our own robots anytime soon, but we are going to get a meteoric rise in expressiveness of physical identity.
A good comparison is photo printing. Even Walmart now carries the expensive Fuji machines that only the top online printers were using.
We'll see the same with Fab -- there will be personal models that work ok. Things will take off though when you can run to Walmart and get things done on a better 3D printer they can afford.
I saw one of thee in action. They material is, I think, a metallic powder and a plastic powder. It produces a somewhat gritty model, using a vastly different process than either the inkjet/glue/powder models, the extruded type, or the laser sintering.
This is about as useful to me as a second nose, but for some reason I really would like to have one. I guess because it represents the next huge step in computers -- home manufacturing. Once that takes off in 30-40 years life will never be the same.
But a great business idea would a small shop, that owns one of these and sells its use. You send them your plans, come in the next day and pick up the part.
It would be like a neighborhood factory, that manufactures anything you want.