3D printing is making huge strides in the design office and on the factory floor. What it is not doing, despite the many claims to the contrary, is making comparable progress in people’s homes and garages. Enthusiasts had expected it to follow a similar trajectory to the personal computer some 30 years before, emerging from the closeted world of professional Big Iron, to find a place on the desktops of ordinary users. As the humble PC steadily improved, mainframe-makers rued the day they dismissed it as hobbyist's toy. Within a decade, firms known collectively as the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell) had shuffled off the scene. Of America's original mainframe-makers, only IBM remained a force to be reckoned with, thanks in no small part to its ubiquitous IBM PC.
When Babbage soldered together his first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, the kit to make it cost a whisker under £80 (ie, £290 or $490 in today’s money). Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data. Despite these limits, the ZX80 taught a generation of enthusiasts how to program efficiently. At the time, the $1,300 Apple II was beyond the reach of most enthusiasts. The ZX80’s modest price helped thousands of youngsters get a headstart in computing.
With the industrial success of 3D printing, pundits have long predicted that once the technology escaped the confines of the manufacturing shop and found its way into hobbyists’ homes, it would cause a similar upheaval in the way people did things. The personal 3D printer—like the personal computer before it—would create a torrent of opportunities as it ushered in an era of distributed manufacturing. People would print their own products from off-the-shelf designs, without the transaction costs of goods made in factories the traditional way.
Reality has proved a little different. Though industrially important, 3D printing has turned out to be nowhere near as disruptive as once imagined, and certainly nothing like the PC. Professional-grade 3D printers, costing anything from $100,000 to $1m, remain the Big Iron of the business, earning their keep making prototypes, mock-ups, one-offs, moulds and dies for the aerospace, motor, electronics and health-care industries. But the technologies pioneered on the shop floor to do this are trickling down but slowly to personal 3D printing.
The one 3D-printing method to make it successfully into the home so far is “fused deposition modelling” (FDM). In this, the object of desire is constructed, layer by layer, by melting a plastic filament and coiling it into the shape required. As ingenious as FDM is, the “maker movement” is still waiting for its equivalent of the Commodore 64, a capable and affordable machine that helped pitchfork the hobbyist computer movement into widespread consumer acceptance.
Another type of 3D printing, stereolithography, may yet challenge FDM for personal use. Stereolithography deposits thin layers of polymer which are then cured by laser or ultraviolet light. The technique was patented by Charles Hull in 1986, several years before Scott Crump patented FDM. These two inventors went on to found the two leading firms in the business today, 3D Systems and Stratasys. 3D Systems is bent on reducing the cost of stereolithography, so it, too, can appeal to the masses.
The problem with desktop 3D printing, however, is not so much price as usefulness. Rudimentary kits can be had for as little as $300 and the best of the bunch cost not much more than $2,000—far less, in real terms, than an Apple II did in 1978. But, whereas early personal computers allowed users to run spreadsheets, do word-processing, build databases and learn to program, today’s personal 3D printers are good for little more than making plastic trinkets and gewgaws.
At least three things prevent personal 3D printing from going mainstream.
When Babbage soldered together his first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, the kit to make it cost a whisker under £80 (ie, £290 or $490 in today’s money). Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data. Despite these limits, the ZX80 taught a generation of enthusiasts how to program efficiently. At the time, the $1,300 Apple II was beyond the reach of most enthusiasts. The ZX80’s modest price helped thousands of youngsters get a headstart in computing. With the industrial success of 3D printing, pundits have long predicted that once the technology escaped the confines of the manufacturing shop and found its way into hobbyists’ homes, it would cause a similar upheaval in the way people did things. The personal 3D printer—like the personal computer before it—would create a torrent of opportunities as it ushered in an era of distributed manufacturing. People would print their own products from off-the-shelf designs, without the transaction costs of goods made in factories the traditional way.
Reality has proved a little different. Though industrially important, 3D printing has turned out to be nowhere near as disruptive as once imagined, and certainly nothing like the PC. Professional-grade 3D printers, costing anything from $100,000 to $1m, remain the Big Iron of the business, earning their keep making prototypes, mock-ups, one-offs, moulds and dies for the aerospace, motor, electronics and health-care industries. But the technologies pioneered on the shop floor to do this are trickling down but slowly to personal 3D printing.
The one 3D-printing method to make it successfully into the home so far is “fused deposition modelling” (FDM). In this, the object of desire is constructed, layer by layer, by melting a plastic filament and coiling it into the shape required. As ingenious as FDM is, the “maker movement” is still waiting for its equivalent of the Commodore 64, a capable and affordable machine that helped pitchfork the hobbyist computer movement into widespread consumer acceptance.
Another type of 3D printing, stereolithography, may yet challenge FDM for personal use. Stereolithography deposits thin layers of polymer which are then cured by laser or ultraviolet light. The technique was patented by Charles Hull in 1986, several years before Scott Crump patented FDM. These two inventors went on to found the two leading firms in the business today, 3D Systems and Stratasys. 3D Systems is bent on reducing the cost of stereolithography, so it, too, can appeal to the masses.
The problem with desktop 3D printing, however, is not so much price as usefulness. Rudimentary kits can be had for as little as $300 and the best of the bunch cost not much more than $2,000—far less, in real terms, than an Apple II did in 1978. But, whereas early personal computers allowed users to run spreadsheets, do word-processing, build databases and learn to program, today’s personal 3D printers are good for little more than making plastic trinkets and gewgaws.
At least three things prevent personal 3D printing from going mainstream.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: Alamy
