[Discuss] 3D Printers

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 11:29 AM,  <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:
> I've had the 3D printer working for about a week now, I have to say its
> interesting.
>
> Some of my friends at work and I have been thinking about this.. Are they
> a fad or a technology with a big future?
>
> I'm still not sure. Yes, they can make a lot of things, but the pieces
> will never be cheaper than mass production.
>...
> One thing I did print was a Raspberry PI project box. it only took 4% of a
> 1kg roll of filament. The filament was on sale at Microcenter for $14.99.
> The box cost about $0.60 in materials, and maybe 5~10 cents of
> electricity. It 10 hours to print. About 5 hours for the top and the
> bottom.

You came close to contradicting yourself here.  I suspect that even
cheap generic
project boxes are likely to cost more at retail than the $0.75 you
apparently spent to
make it yourself.

As you noted, the quality probably wasn't as good;
but we can always hope that "The Innovator's Dilemma" scenario will
take care of that for us.
And it should be noted that being able to have a precise custom made
object may have its own value.

If for no other reason than convenience, I believe that 3D printing
will start to take off
once it can provide reasonably equivalent quality for about the same
price as the object could be obtained in a regular retail environment.
All the stupid plastic parts that go into appliances, toys,
cars, etc. which either are impossible to find or are outrageously
priced are ripe for this.  It will be
interesting to see how manufacturers adapt.   Will they try to try to
introduce the equivalent
of torx bits to make it impossible to fix anything without
authorization? Or will they instead embrace the change by perhaps
making the needed 3D design files available and stop making/selling
spare parts
entirely?  Life might be easier for them, if they could tweak their
design whenever they liked
and not have to worry about making/stocking spare parts for all of the variants.

Bill Bogstad