“Ford Motor Company, which recently celebrated the production of their 500,000th 3D-printed industrial part.”
I remain skeptical because of surface finish, speed, strength, and materials property limitations. But that item above caught my eye. Anybody know what part Ford is making and why they selected 3D printing?
I consulted to a printed electronics startup company about ten years ago and that has proven to be a real tough nut to crack.
Horsehocky. 3D Printing will be another manufacturing tool. You wont be able to produce 1-off custom cars with it affordably as this article seems to suggest because you (or most people) lack the engineering know-how to design & certify the type.
Plus material science has a long way to catchup to leverage this technology.
During a tour of a GM plant, the tour guide was bragging about how fast they could crank out automobiles and said “in fact, we once even produced one car in only one hour!”
A man in the group spoke up and said “Sir, I believe I am the owner of that car.”
It seems to me they've ignored time in their cost equation. An injection mold can kick out dozens of widgets in a hour; how much time would it take for a 3D printer to print one widget? If your company needs several hundred widgets quickly, wouldn't this enter into your calculations?
I was relaxing last night watching a car show of construction of the Koeningsberg One:1. They were making RIMS from carbon fiber. The whole car was carbon fiber but the engine and suspension. Some smart feller is gonna 3D print that car! Bring the price down from $3 million to about thirty grand, I bet.
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson said (in "The Diamond Age") that there exist only the business of things and the business of entertainment, and the business of things is not very interesting when nanotechnology can produce anything.
And that sort of observation gets us back to Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" where information/entertainment simply becomes a control mechanism in a post-scarcity society which should have more freedom but which may end up with less freedom.
I think you might see medical 3D printing, too...
We all know how that turned out. Other companies exploited the technology and Moore's law eventually allowed them to market cheap digital cameras with high amount of megapixels. The technology became so cheap and miniaturized that they started building cameras into cell phones and tablets.
The same is occurring with 3D printing.
Many people are scoffing at it because it looks so primitive. But it is progressing rapidly and about to hit that curve where it becomes really disruptive.
For example, let's say you own a chain of auto parts stores. If so, I would be very worried. Because the time is soon coming where car repair shops can just print their own parts on demand.
For example, if you need parts like those pictured below, you simply have GM, Ford, Nissan (or whoever) email you the file, for a fee of course, and you print it out on your 3D printer. This cuts your auto parts store right out of the loop.
And this is just the beginning of the disruption about to occur.
Additive manufacturing is here to stay and it will be exploding exponentially.