Vid: Technology rules! "Printing Titanium"

Imagine the possibilities,

Imagine walking into the the local bike shop letting them know which part you need, them downloading the design and producing the part out the back in the work shop there and then!

Probably a long way off that point, but it is cool.

Could see how it would benefit F1 teams, instant parts and the ability to make slight changes as needed.

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Cool vids. I'm a firm believer additive manufacturing will become a very powerful tool in the coming years. The technology behind it has come so far so quickly...It's awesome.

About 10 years ago I went to an HP open house. They had a 3D printer which operated the same way as in the first video.
Except it used some sand like material, not titanium. They printed a ball bearing as a demo of what could be done with additive printing. Pretty cool.
Right now, you need a part, you go to the store, and they have to order it because they don't want to stock it. Maybe in the future they'll just print it while you wait.

scottie i saw that during the F1 of Austin broadcast... that is so effing cool how they can do that right in Pit Lane!

So cool. One needs this kind of news, vids rather more often rather than the negative crap we are being fed with on the telly. I just picture me owning one of these, and totally blinging out my YZ125!!!

DIY 3D printers are now commercially available and within reasonable price points. It's amazing, majorly disruptive technology. Imagine being able to "print" your own grips or various plastic components at home!

http://www.makerbot.com
http://www.stratasys.com/Products/3D-Printers.aspx

Hopefully this helps bring bicycle parts prices down from absurdly ridiculous to just plain ridiculous.

Mkay? How's that even possible. I go back to my Dr-stuff, a bit more easy to understand.

The technology is not that new, I was making SLS rapid parts for aerospace control grips back in 05. The materials are getting better but not nearly as strong as parts made conventionally, I would be very worried about that on using that on any high stress areas. Don't get too happy yet, its still fuzed together material to make a shape.

I have done a little reading over the past few years on 3D printers......and this is "kind of" like that. But most of those were forming and producing objects out of a high strength plastic / polymer. That first video Scottie posted........left me kind of speechless. That is just simply amazing. Basically anything your mind can think of and be able to write out the 3D object in a readable program......the printer will create it. This is a lot bigger news than most people think. It can create things in which are not only stronger , but things in which we could of never produced before. I'll say it again.....that's incredible!

3d printing is very real. i've mucked around with a few models in cad and am tempted to order a markerbot replicator 2.



There will be a time in the near future where you will pay for "something" and it'll be printed in your living room in a matter of minutes.
Be pretty usefull for my traxxas rc car :D

It's definitely a super cool technology! Every printer manufacturer uses a different approach to produce the part. We purchased our 3D Systems Printer a little over a year ago, and use it to prototype all our products. It's much faster to print what you want as opposed to programming and setting up a machining center with multiple operations. The personal printers look cool and seem to be affordable, but are limited. Ours will print 16 micron layers, but also cost over $100K! It will print assemblies, but it is limited to a plastic build material. The Direct Metal Laser Sintering printers are closer to $700K which puts them out of range for a lot of businesses.

We had one of the plastic type printers a few years ago and it worked good for doing rapid prototype stuff. Essentially it heated really fine plastic material to melting and printed it. We even made some fan blades for a cpu water cooler that our client was working on. The thing that they don't let you in on is that you need to know cad to create the files unless someone gives it to you. Then just like machining, that cad drawing needs to be converted into a file that the machine can use to build the part.

So does this mean that in the future, there will be no such thing as an "obsolete" part? It would be awesome if parts for all the old, crappy mx bikes in my garage were suddenly available again.

You could re-create any old part right now, at a certain higher cost. This technology, as well as 3D Scanning, will allow parts to be produced much easier and faster. In the near future, the price gap won't be as big, and will be more readily available.

I did a little reading about the capability of printing tool steel. It seemed that post machining would be needed. Also, most precision parts that are heat treated will almost always require post machining. It seems that the machines also run off of G code, which is the normal CNC language. There may be simple conversational language for simpler machines like the Makerbot.

I would say that it would be tough to make extremely high strength pieces from these machines as of now...........but give it 10 years?