[ExI] 3d printers for sale

[Charlie Stross]

On 25 Aug 2012, at 14:27, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 10:28 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> Got a 3D printer three weeks ago, set it to print a copy of itself.  Took
>> all day, but finished.  Next day, did it again.  And again the day after
>> that.  Now I have over a million 3D printers, no place to put them all.
>> Need to sell some cheap, quickly.  Otherwise tomorrow I will have two
>> million of them.
> 
> LOL. Seriously though, can't the 3d printers available today only
> print certain parts of themselves? I thought there were still some
> metal parts and such that had to be fabricated the old fashioned way.

That is indeed true, but ...

On Friday I got a tour of the MIT Media Lab. Wherein I saw no less than three (and possibly more) entirely different types of 3D printer -- specifically, additive depositional machines -- from the typical MakerBot/RepRap squirt-hot-gunk-onto-a-plate variety we're familiar with. For example: an additive lathe, for making axisymmetric objects (depositing rather than removing material around a central axial support), a 2D pin-grid (like an old dot-matrix printer head, only as a 2D grid rather than a line) designed to support a deformable sheet of substrate (molten solder, in this case), and so on. Not to mention a *really cool* hand-held grinding tool with 3D positional sensors; the demo was of a guy with no experience of sculpture turning a brick into a model of an elephant, with the tool moving its grinding head back out of the way if he tried to gouge too deep into the substrate.

There's more than one way to build a 3D printer, and I suspect our first fully self-reproducing ones will actually consist of a whole bunch of specialised printing tools that each have different tasks.


-- Charlie