The Magic of 3-D Printing

by wj

The Economist Intelligence Unit offers a running series of papers on various industries. Recently, they produced one on Technology’s impact on emerging-market supply chains. An entire section was devoted to looking at how 3-D printing would transform manufacturing. Much of it was mildly insightful — nothing radical, but sensible.

And then there was this line: “3D printing offers perhaps the biggest opportunity to emerging markets as it allows companies to manufacture with limited up-front investment — all that is needed is a design and a printer.” The point being that 3-D printing would allow emerging economies to compete in making various manufactures.

Let’s think about that a minute. Yes, you need a design and a printer. But that isn’t sufficient, is it? Because, unless you have something to do custom transmutation of elements, you are going to need stuff to feed into your printer. In fact, you will need fine powders of every element or compound that is required by the design. And where, in an emerging economy, might you purchase such a thing? (For that matter, where in a developed economy would you purchase such a thing?)

Maybe 3-D printing isn’t the wonder-solution for the future of manufacturing that it’s advertised to be. At least, not now — and perhaps not all that soon either. It will do lots of neat things. But it won’t live up to its hype.

22 thoughts on “The Magic of 3-D Printing”

  1. And where, in an emerging economy, might you purchase such a thing?
    I imagine the point is that if you need different 100 parts to build and maintain device X, and your supply chain is not great, its far easier to get reliable sourcing of the 3 feedstocks you need rather then the 100 parts.
    It’s why the Navy is looking at it: a battle group on deployment has a very long supply chain. Is it easier to predict what amounts of the 1000s of components might break in what quantities and store replacements, or easier to have a SLM device and piles of titanium powder?
    http://www.networkworld.com/article/2943724/it-skills-training/navy-goes-all-in-on-3d-printing-technology.html
    In a developed economy with reliable supply chains, it can make way more sense to source the part from the factory that has the tooling to make the part very very cheaply and ship it. Because the shipping is fast and reliable.
    In the absence of fast and reliable shipping, there can be huge advantages to being able to “source” many parts from a single feedstock…you can manage the supply of that single feedstock much better than 100s of parts.
    I think the real criticism is that you’re relatively limited in materials. A couple of plastics with most 3D printers (potentially extensible to metal via casting), and if you have a lot of capital, you can manufacture metal parts using 3D printing…but even then they won’t have the same properties as conventionally processed metal parts.

  2. And where, in an emerging economy, might you purchase such a thing? (For that matter, where in a developed economy would you purchase such a thing?)
    On the internet, of course.
    –TP

  3. I’m not sure why this came to mind almost immediately, but I’m amused by the idea of a great disruption in the market for Frisbees.

  4. To elaborate on what may have seemed like snark:
    Makers of things have always had to rely on suppliers of materials, in advanced economies as well as developing ones. The whole point of The Economy is that everybody is a middleman.
    The earliest potters in dim antiquity (the first practitioners of 3-D printing, when you think about it) probably had to dig up their own clay, but that was possibly the last time when manufacturers were their own suppliers to a significant extent.
    –TP

  5. 3-D printing is really mostly about a) rapid prototyping, b) making a master for casting, and c) making a custom product out of printable plastic. Toys and the like, for one.
    What’s more handy, and rarer, is 3-D laser sintering, or Direct Metal Laser Sintering. It’s more expensive to do because the machine is a lot more expensive. As in: half a million dollars, ballparkish. They might be had a bit more cheaply, but you’re talking a couple of orders of magnitude more than a 3D printer working in plastic. DMLS can make nearly full-strength parts from metal powder and a 3D design.
    The thing is, though: it’s about the same cost to run those machines here in the US as it is to run them overseas, I think. Most of the cost of a finished product is going to be offsetting the cost of the machine and the raw materials. Some of the cost is going to overhead (building, power and administrative cost) and that part will almost certainly be cheaper overseas.
    I honestly don’t know where this is going to go next. I would guess that if it does start, there’s going to be a lot of people in e.g. SE Asia learning how to produce 3D designs cheaply, for custom parts. I think that’s where the money might be. But this is not really my area.

  6. @Tony P.
    You might be surprised. At the very least, some manufacturers have gone in for very deep vertical integration, so that they wound up starting from very close to raw materials. Ford’s River Rouge Complex is a famous example; it actually had a coke oven and a steel mill so that Ford could go from raw ore to completed cars all on one site. That kind of thing is often important for manufacturers who are pushing the envelope of what’s possible; they need complete control over their processes to make that happen.

  7. In today’s WSJ: Hollywood’s Other Piracy Problem: 3-D Printers. I can’t read the whole thing (I don’t have access), but a friend posted some quotes:

    Right after watching the trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” last April, Ken Landrum began building his own Stormtrooper gun. From his home in St. Louis, he cobbled together images of the “blaster” featured in the ad, and then used software on his personal computer to design nearly 40 separate pieces to be 3-D printed and assembled into a near-exact replica of the Walt Disney Co. prop.
    “My goal is to make it better than the studio did,” he said. At a minimum, he has done it faster: Mr. Landrum posted photos of his design on a message board for 3-D printing enthusiasts—some eight months before the movie premieres and five months before most official Disney toys hit shelves. As the movie’s opening gets closer, fans have filled his inbox asking for the files needed to print their own. Mr. Landrum said he handed out more than 100 in one week in mid-July, recently deciding to start charging $55 a file. “It’s gone haywire,” he said.
    Mr. Landrum’s hobby is part of a looming problem for Hollywood. The steady rise of 3-D printing as an accessible activity for millions means that the specter of digital piracy, which has wreaked havoc on the media business in the Internet age, now hangs over sales of physical products long considered immune to such forces.

    The difference, of course, is that a 3D-printed copy of a physical object is likely to be expensive and of low quality — unlike an electronic copy of an electronic object, which is perfect.
    The problem Hollywood faces is that Landrum’s copy is *better* than theirs — he’s willing to make more pieces because assembly is a game for him, not a cost. But honestly, this is capitalism: they’re leaving holes in the market, someone is willing to exploit them.

  8. What’s more handy, and rarer, is 3-D laser sintering
    To nitpick, I think its now commonly accepted to use both “3D printing” and “Additive Manufacturing” as synonyms for the field as a whole:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing#Terminology_and_methods
    By the early 2010s, the terms 3D printing and additive manufacturing developed senses in which they were synonymous umbrella terms for all AM technologies.

  9. 3-D printers are becoming incredibly useful in medicine. I am wearing a crown which was made by a 3-D printer. They’re starting to be used to grow spare body parts. It’s pretty amazing.

  10. I think making crowns with 3-D printing is becoming standard dental practice.
    Leaving dentistry aside, the business of materials is tricky of course, but if you get manufacturing costs down enough you may be able to substitute. Choice of materials depends on lots of factors, and you may be able to trade off raw material costs against weight, time, durability, and so on.
    I am aware of one firm that sells 3-D printers – none too expensively – that work in carbon fiber, for example. It’s expensive stuff but at some point the advantages kick in.

  11. All good points.
    But my reason for raising the subject was the (apparent) perception that 3-D printing was going to solve all manufacturing problems. With no recognition that raw materials would still be required.
    Reading the whole article, that certainly seemed to be where the authors were going. And it isn’t the first time I have seen that kind of blindness on the subject.

  12. My “3-D printed” dental crowns were 5-axis milled, not additively printed. But as thompson points out, “3-D printing” has become an umbrella term.
    To me, the amazing technology was what my dentist used to “design” the crowns in the first place: a toothbrush-size camera feeding 2-D photos to a piece of software that deduces the required 3-D shape, displays it, allows him to sculpt it as necessary, and produces a string of bits that command the tool to carve the exact shape he wants. Software is goddam amazing to a MechE like me.
    –TP

  13. Roger Moore,
    River Rouge did cross my mind. And I would not be shocked to learn that Henry Ford also owned the iron mines and coal mines that fed it. But he was a contrarian old cuss, not your average manufacturer.
    Deep vertical integration is surely necessary for some leading-edge manufacturers, and I suppose Tesla’s battery megafactory would be today’s analog to Ford’s River Rouge. I’ve had mixed feelings about the value of vertical integration over my engineering career. The long-gone Digital Equipment, where I worked for some years, designed and built its own disk drives. That strategy might have made sense early on, but it seemed misguided to me even as it was paying my salary. On a much smaller scale, at other companies, I have often found it worthwhile to replace off-the-shelf subsystems (actuators, sensors, etc.) with custom-designed assemblies of lower-level components, usually in order to achieve better specs (as you suggest) rather than, for example, cost reduction. So I’ve been known to push for what we might call “shallow vertical integration”, at least.
    Anyway, back to the original point: the “raw” material for 3-D printing is not all that raw, and trade rather than vertical integration is where it effectively comes from.
    –TP

  14. The earliest potters in dim antiquity (the first practitioners of 3-D printing, when you think about it) probably had to dig up their own clay, but that was possibly the last time when manufacturers were their own suppliers to a significant extent.
    You have obviously not met the Artisanal Potters of Williamsburg.

  15. there’s a big collection of potters in the nearby town of Seagrove NC (hundreds of miles from the sea). many of them dig their own clay.

  16. But as thompson points out, “3-D printing” has become an umbrella term.
    Not to focus entirely on nitpicking, but milling would be a subtractive process and wouldn’t fit under that umbrella term, at least as far as I understand it.

  17. But my reason for raising the subject was the (apparent) perception that 3-D printing was going to solve all manufacturing problems.
    So, full disclosure…I couldn’t find the article to read it. Quite possibly because I surf with NoScript, and a lot of webpages are broken to me.
    But yeah, if that’s the contention, its going to be a long time before that’s the case, if ever.
    3D printing has two huge advantages: you don’t need to create the tooling for production, and it can make things that are functionally impossible with subtractive techniques.
    That makes it very useful with certain complex and variable geometries (for example, biomedical applications), and for things where the output is minimal (prototyping, custom, etc) or the supply chain is deficient (getting feedstock to make a variety of parts is easier than sourcing a variety of parts).
    But at the end of the day, large production runs using standard techniques are probably going to be cheaper per unit, and that won’t change any time soon, I don’t think.

  18. Not to focus entirely on nitpicking, but milling would be a subtractive process and wouldn’t fit under that umbrella term, at least as far as I understand it.
    Well the term “3-D printer” seems to be used for both processes (see, for example, this and this). I’m comfortable stating that my crown was made by one.

  19. Well the term “3-D printer” seems to be used for both processes
    Learn something new everyday, and I apologize to Tony for the nitpicking.
    I know some MEs that would angrily insist otherwise, but language is more often defined by the masses than the experts 🙂

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