A New Dimension in 'Printing'

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A New Dimension in 'Printing'

5/17/2007

By Terry Calhoun

What's a 3D Printer? If you already know, then you are probably like my editor, who wrote to me: "I freaking love those printers. The first one that comes down below $1k, I'm buying. I don't care that I have no use for one." If you don't know already, then I bet your best guess is wrong--because you never would have guessed that, in their current crude state, they have a lot in common with an Easy Bake Snack Oven.

My son-in-law, Nic Spitler, a very talented and skilled furniture designer, is a senior at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. Last fall, he showed me one of his class projects, a design for a printer. It was made out of a composite of nylon, glass, and aluminum, with no moving parts, and looked like a sculptor had chiseled and sanded it. I didn't pay much attention to the way it had been produced but thought that it was cool that he had designed it on a computer screen and that it had then been produced by a machine without any handling by human hands.

It turns out that his creation, which was about the size of the inkjet printer on my desk in my home office, was "printed" by a 3D printer. If I had known that was what they were called then, I would have been more interested. I wish I had. Now that I've done a little research, I think this is a product that's going to move into our lives faster than laser printers did. One current model fits on your desk and weights about 90 pounds. This brings us one step closer to living in stuff from science fiction that I have dreamed about for decades! At the moment they're mostly in design schools, moving into design firms, and even into high schools.

Want to make your own army of small soldiers to play with? (Remember those? To modern eyes they look like skateboarders. [Editor's note: More like skateboarding Ghurkas with field rifles. --D.N.]) Or want to make your own set of Legos? Did you loose a checker or a chess piece? For about $5,000, you can buy a 3D printer that will make them for you, according to your own computerized design. "'In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,' Cornell University Professor Hod Lipson was quoted as saying in this Neoseeker article. 'You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?'" Another article, "Star Trek Style Replicator to Hit Market," has some ideas.

Sure, the basic materials that you have to feed into the "printer"--boy, it's hard for me to call these "printers!"--cost about $0.50 per cubic foot. Oops, I got a few years ahead of myself, it's actually $0.50 per cubic