If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve, massively?
It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something, so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot.
There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from that too much.
But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's supposed to cover everything.
No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone know someone who doesn't own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to print. Is that just for nerds?
When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print. Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time - will be built. How is that not going to be popular?
It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable. This guy needs to think more long-term.
Sho, you make good points, but the comparison is closer than you think. You mention the high cost of specialty fabrics, but the plastics market is even more complex. The 1-7 coding for recycling on plastic containers is a gross oversimplification. Plastics are engineered for specialty applications to be more flexible, heat resistant, more easily bonded to other plastics, etc. Trying to get an ounce of plastics like that will also cost considerable sums.
To your point about 2D printing, think about how uniform the feedstocks are. 4 colors of ink can be sprayed on paper to recreate a rainbow of colors. 2D printing is almost platonic in its simplicity. 3D printers may work with a subset of materials in the future, but its a drop in the bucket.
Also, I see clothes as a special case as well, but one that is MORE likely to be customized. Sure you may just need a commodity item like a black Tshirt, but clothing is one of the most personalized product cateogries. Custom neck ties, new fashions, printed Tshirts, etc. Just look at the startups in the space: Threadless, Cafepress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, etc.
Hm, also good points, but I still think your conclusions are too "confused by the present situation".
For example, you rightly mention the awesome variety of plastics. But how many of them are really, when it comes down to it, essential to the functionality of the end product?
I see many, many of these different plastics as existing not because of their inherent qualities in the end product but due to other factors. For example, you mention a type of plastic that bonds well to others. That is a manufacturing concern. It could be essential for the final idealised product to glue two plastics, but it could just as easily be an artefact of the manufacturing process.
Another thing you fail to consider is the disappearance of the scale manufacturing incentive to reduce material costs. If you're making 100,000 copies of something, every percent reduction in your materials cost, and in the complexity of manufacture, becomes very significant. But if you're making 1, the materials cost is almost irrelevant, and you don't care about being able to stamp out one a second. How much could the removal of that factor influence the design?
Consider a milk bottle. In manufacturing millions of them, there is every incentive to reduce costs. So we have the cheapest possible plastic which is food-safe but strong and moldable enough to have a handle, etc. Another type of plastic for a soft drink bottle. Another for a jar of honey, another for your takeaway food container. But every single one of these could actually be functionally replaced by, say, metal. The different plastics, the use of plastic at all, is not fundamental to the function, it is a side-effect of marginal costs in scale manufacturing. This is probably a bad example but I hope it shows the point.
How many types of "building block" do we need? It is probably an unanswerable question but even so, it is surely orders of magnitude less than the question you're answering, which is "how many do we currently have".
And your point about clothes - the "customisations" you are talking about are superficial only, just what is printed on the front! The actual clothing is identical. Cafepress do not design and manufacture a unique type of t-shirt just for you. You are actually kind of proving my point ;)
Sho, Great critique, but I think your conclusions underplay the importance of manufacturing. Granted we probably don't need as many plastics as we currently have, but even a single polymer like Lexan would need to come in many colors. These colors also also impacted by "flake" material being included to introduce reflectivity and a variety of other special effects. Also, the nature of molding something allows you to have certain material properties that cannot be achieved through additive fabrication.
Of course, we could move to metal for some product categories, but cost becomes an issue there as well, you might be willing to pay more for a one off object, but 20X as is the norm now?
Regarding the superficial nature of most clothing customization, you are correct that most offerings only allow you to change graphics, but Walmart has a tremendous business along those lines. Also, next generation startups like www.propercloth.com are allowing more customization in fit and function.
In any case I think we both have valid points and there is only so much we can accomplish on a message board. If you are ever in Boston give me a shout.
How about a compromise: you submit your design to Zazzle or whatever and they 3D print it for you.
Same principle as ordering a 2D print right now. Some people print at home because it's instant and cheaper and there's no shipping cost. But there's plenty of reasons to order 2D prints online instead, including different materials, potentially higher quality, and lower up-front costs.
The 3D printing concept seems like it works even better than 2D printing as a made-to-order service; it's more dependent on materials, a fancier machine will be able to make better stuff, you probably don't need it instantly, and shipping costs will be relatively smaller.
> Consider a milk bottle. In manufacturing millions of them, there is
> every incentive to reduce costs. So we have the cheapest possible
> plastic which is food-safe but strong and moldable enough to have a
> handle, etc. Another type of plastic for a soft drink bottle. Another
> for a jar of honey, another for your takeaway food container. But
> every single one of these could actually be functionally replaced by,
> say, metal. The different plastics, the use of plastic at all, is not
> fundamental to the function, it is a side-effect of marginal costs in
> scale manufacturing.
I’m no expert on manufacturing, but I think you could use the same
low-grade high-density polyethylene used for the milk bottle for the
soft-drink bottle, the jar of honey, and the takeaway food box as
well. It would be thicker and heavier in some cases, and you wouldn’t
be able to see through it as well as the PET that’s currently used for
the soft-drink bottle or the crystal polystyrene used for see-through
takeaway food boxes. (You could also use PET for all of those things.
PS is less versatile because it’s brittle.)
I don’t think this is where 3-D printing is going to make a big impact
first, though. The objects you’re describing have a large potential
market for them, where they compete on material properties and low
cost with other objects. You can presumably mix just-in-time filled
systems in your 3-D printer to get a wider range of material
properties but I think that may not be a comparative advantage for 3-D
printers in the near future.
Instead, think about objects that are more customized to their
surroundings, where shipping and inventory is a major part of the
retail cost: drawer pulls, power strips for the number of plugs you
actually have (integrated into your 3-D printed desk), planters,
replacement machine parts, prosthetic body parts,
screws of funny sizes, and so on.
I've got a unique perspective on things as I've looked into both sewing AND 3D printing for different hobbies. Sewing as a young kid, 3D printing as I got older.
As someone who owned and learned how to use a sewing machine at the ripe old age of 10, I can't help to find fault in this guy's argument.
Admittedly I was building Rokkaku's, Speedwing Stacks and Parafoils out of ripstop nylon and carbon fibre (well, the parafoils didn't use carbon fibre), but that's not the point.
I recently looked into 3D printing for producing components for another hobby of mine (tabletop wargaming) and the fact is that it is stupidly expensive at the moment in terms of both purchasing a machine or getting someone to print for you. I ended up just learning to sculpt and scratchbuild with polystyrene card.
Now to address some of his points.
1. when someone develops a 3D modeling application that anyone can use and many can master
2. when someone develops a post consumer recycled 3D printing material
I'm fairly sure you can recycle acrylic and print with acrylic, so where's the disconnect there? My chemistry isn't up to scratch so can someone please clarify?
3. when printing metal and circuits becomes cheap
Got me there, I never researched printing either of these things, so I can't comment.
You can't actually recycle plastics like you can aluminum. Each time your reheat and remold the polymer it breaks down and eventually becomes unusable. Even when recycled plastic is used in industry it is typically Pre-consumer. e.g. when you go to the movie theater and get a "Watchmen" soda cup, sometimes they misprint whole batches. Those are ground up and mixed with virgin plastic before they ever leave the factory.
For sure, you can actually get wax printers now, but the properties of wax keep it from being useful in conditions where heat or durability are concerns. Currently, they are used to make patterns for metal casting in the jewelry industry.
Blender as an example for 3d modeling application anyone can use and master? I suspect the author and you have seriously different understandings of usability, to put it mildly.
Blender isn't actually very complicated to use once you get used to the way it was designed.
It's menu's might be a bit confusing to begin with, but I had the same sort of experience when switching from office 2003 to 2007, until I got used to it that is.
I will clarify 2 for you; yes, my school has two 3d printers. one uses acrylic. both can't print more than a 15cm by 15cm by 10cm object, and both are huge.
secondly, blender was a bad chioce; but I can't think of a better one off the topof my head.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, how is blender a bad choice? Have you actually sat down and tried to use it for an extended period of time?
I learnt modelling under 3DS max, purchased and worked on a copy of Maya 2008 and only recently have switched to Blender to work on a different project (mostly to try and prove a concept)
While Blender does have it's own nuances (eg, the menu's change based on context) it isn't any worse than the other tools in the case of workflow for model creation. Nothing overly noticeable anyway. In fact, they advocate learning and using mostly keyboard shortcuts which is handy.
However on the animation side (different kettle of fish understandably) it has a vastly superior workflow and I can produce content at a faster rate, which I would estimate to be 2x faster?
But really, the difference in price between Blender (free) and Maya (starts at $2k per license) and many of the other Autodesk (Autocad starts at $4k, 3DSmax at about $3k) the difference in price is astounding. Even Zbrush which is a fairly artist friendly tool starts at $600
Besides, Blender is open source. If you don't like something in it, change it...
FYI.. You can buy Goretex by the yard from Outdoor Wilderness Fabrics (http://www.owfinc.com/), everything else you need can be purchased from other cottage industry suppliers.. you just have to know where to look.
Some friends who have a textiles nanocorp think their filing cabinet full of supplier contact information is their major competitive advantage. (If I were a British headline writer, I would say they have a textiles nanocorp supplier contact information file cabinet competition advantage.)
If you didn't read it, the author is basically saying that 3D printers will never go "mainstream" for the same reasons that most people don't own or use sewing machines and make their own clothes. But this is almost a completely spurious point and refers only to the current and near future state of technology. He is right in that no-one but nerds would be interested in current or even substantially improved 3D printers, where there's still a lot of cost, time and fiddling around to do in order to print your useless plasticky widget. But who doesn't think the technology will improve, massively?
It's a completely bogus comparison. Clothes are almost a special case. The source textile is important, the way it's designed is hugely important - more important than function, a lot of the time. Good textiles, in case you've ever tried to buy any, are not available below truly massive quantities and half the time not available at all. I once had the idea that I was going to make myself a "kewl" jacket out of black gore-tex (or similar) based on a pattern from a disassembled other jacket. I could not source any material from anywhere in quantities under 100m or so. This is $60+/m fabric or something, so my starting cost, just to get the material, was $6k+ (numbers were probably higher, I forgot). Needless to say, I didn't bother. So it's not like you can just sew anything at all - you are dependent on upstream factors a lot.
There's another factor he overlooks, too. Clothes are a huge but fairly generic category. Most people wear fairly "normal" clothes like, say, jeans and t-shirts, or suits and shirts. If you need, say, another black t-shirt, it is fairly safe to assume you can find one nearby, and these basic items can be produced on massive scale at low cost. Of course no-one is going to sew their own black t-shirt. And most people don't really wear clothes that aren't available at scale. You could make a good case that 90+% of clothing is widely available mass market, and the psychology of clothes prevents deviating from that too much.
But the 3D printing idea isn't supposed to cover the generic cases, it's supposed to cover everything.
No, I think 3D printers will be more like, well, 2D printers, and right now we're in about the 70s level of small-scale print development. Does anyone know someone who doesn't own an inkjet or something? And yet you have to feed that as well - paper and ink - and you have to tell the computer to print. Is that just for nerds?
When the technology is there, imagine buying the raw materials at a nearby shop, just like you'd buy a ream of paper. You plug the thing into your computer, just like a 2D printer. You open the "document" and hit print. Anything the thing can build - and the potential is almost unlimited, in time - will be built. How is that not going to be popular?
It's not going to be this year or next, but in a decade I'd be pretty surprised if there wasn't a much, much larger market for on-demand manufacturing (and, for that matter, book printing). It just seems inevitable. This guy needs to think more long-term.