3D printing - the end of the beginning?

I just returned home from attending the IMTS show in Chicago. There was a whole floor dedicated to Additive Manufacturing or 3 D Printing. It was amazing what they can do. It started using plastics and then the vendors were showing printing steels and aluminum. They showed how lasers melt the metal as it is squirted out. It is amazing the shapes and parts it can make. This industry in my opinion is much like EDM machining was years ago. People scuffed it off at first and look where it is today. Times are changing and metal cutting will probably a thing of the past in 50 years. Ingersoll had photo's of huge gantry printing machines printing jet plane wings and turbine propellers. It will revolutionize manufacturing as we know it.
Ingersoll and ORNL Partner for Massive WHAM 3D Printer > ENGINEERING.com

1.

They all want to design super strong hollow parts with INTENRAL RIBBING and mix and match material on the same part.

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Actually, *I* want to do that, and I'm old fart.

2. It's worth thinking about technologies/processes that "lose share" versus those that "fade away to be hobby/art"

So, for modern commercial/educational/etc. printing, almost nobody uses a letterpress - it's inkjet or some kind of laserjet or web roll press driven by photo resist plates.

Or, for modern transport in the 1st world, only special groups (e.g. the Ammish) still use horses as a principal transportation power plant.

Typewriters - only used by people who like them, or for odd special cases.

BUT compare these with "lose share, sometimes while growing in absolute terms, or staying very large businesses"

Last I saw, the fraction of all welding done with stick welding was down, but the absolute volume of stick welding rods used was up. That is, stick welding is growing, but the rest of welding is growing faster.

PCs - the worldwide market probably peaked about 2011 (this is harder to sort out than you might think) at something like 90 million units a quarter (360 million units a year). It has since declined to something on the order of 300 million units a year. In "decline" - you bet. Going to disappear against the onslaught of tablets and phones? Uh, there are more pressing things to worry about.

Manual machine tools. Kind of a huge "well duh" example - CNC rules the world in many ways - BUT - people still buy old and new manual machines, and even computer geeks like me think they have their uses. (I can imagine CNC machines maturing to a point where that isn't true - but current market pressures don't seem to be driving them in that direction.)

And indeed, EDM has become A Big Thing. Waterjet is now a Big Thing. They control 100% of manufacturing between them, right? Oh, no, not even close...


So, will metal removal (or wood removal) end up like the typerwriter - a very niche mostly artist collector thing - or like stick welding or the PC - a big thing, just not THE big thing???? I predict the latter.


Always remember that a lot of what you see "buzz" about in the media is the set of product (be it goods, services, or some combo) that offer the most opportunity for GROWTH.

3D printing will get a lot of buzz, because it might well grow by leaps and bounds. The market for 3-axis VMCs can't really grow by leaps and bounds, because so much of the market already has such machines. Just like the market for smart phones cannot actually grow at the rates of the early days - there are only so many people on Earth, they won't all want or afford one. Hence, the ever greater focus on watches and the like.

My biggest concern is that it will be used as a tool to funnel money and opportunity away from the working class people who are being made redundant by them. Great if you're a machine owner or person buying parts, less so if you're person who is being made redundant. But thats sort of always been the format, so nothing novel there. Something something seizing the means of reproduction.

On the other hand, printed parts generate very little scrap. No chips really. Scrapped parts can be reprocessed into good parts. So your $9/day 3d printer operator won't cost you too much money before he goes home to his Amazon sponsored 3d printed hibernation tube that he shares in shifts with 2 other workers.

I know next to nothing about the capabilities of 3D printed technology, so here's a couple of questions.

Can these machines print in multiple alloys in the same part?

Can they print in wax, as in Investment casting?

I know folks that worked at Teledyne C.A.E. in Toledo. Both of them ran CNCs that were machining waxes for compressor blades, in 1985 or so.
I start in the trade as an assistant to my dad who made investment casting molds. The technology has always fascinated me.

Thunderjet said:

I know next to nothing about the capabilities of 3D printed technology, so here's a couple of questions.

Can these machines print in multiple alloys in the same part?

Can they print in wax, as in Investment casting?

I know folks that worked at Teledyne C.A.E. in Toledo. Both of them ran CNCs that were machining waxes for compressor blades, in 1985 or so.
I start in the trade as an assistant to my dad who made investment casting molds. The technology has always fascinated me.

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Several of the plastics can substitute for wax. They burnout at a higher temperature.

Thunderjet said:

Can they print in wax, as in Investment casting?

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Oh that's cool.

Thanks guys.

I think we should form regional tiger teams and start a program to find, target, infiltrate and smash to smithereens all these 3D metal printers before they take our jobs !!!

In all seriousness, VW is going to "print" gear knobs in "2-3 years". Give me a break. That's just PR, not corporate strategy.

If you think 3D printing is going to take off, why don't you start a powdered aluminum or powdered steel manufacturing business? I want to see the look on the Ford purchasing agent's face when you tell him you will be happy to sell him powdered steel at $6 a pound.

jscpm said:

I think we should form regional tiger teams and start a program to find, target, infiltrate and smash to smithereens all these 3D metal printers before they take our jobs !!!

In all seriousness, VW is going to "print" gear knobs in "2-3 years". Give me a break. That's just PR, not corporate strategy.

If you think 3D printing is going to take off, why don't you start a powdered aluminum or powdered steel manufacturing business? I want to see the look on the Ford purchasing agent's face when you tell him you will be happy to sell him powdered steel at $6 a pound.

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If you DON'T think 3D printing is going to take off, you've got your head in the sand.
You sound like the guys who thought IBM was a stupid business with a product nobody wanted.

TeachMePlease said:

If you DON'T think 3D printing is going to take off, you've got your head in the sand.
You sound like the guys who thought IBM was a stupid business with a product nobody wanted.

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About six or seven years ago I was one of the speakers at an elites forum and the moderator asked what currently hyped technology would not work, and I named autonomous cars and gave my reasons why. This little speech made me extremely unpopular at the forum because all of the (non-technical) elites were convinced driverless cars were right around the corner, because, hey, that's what the newspapers are saying, and newspapers are always right. Here we are seven years later and self driving cars have progressed no farther than when I gave my speech, and my reasons given then are just as valid today as they were then.

People want to believe this stuff and pour billions into it, but math is math and physics is physics. Just because you saw a self-driving car in Star Wars, doesn't mean it will work in reality.

Back in the 1990s, John Scully, CEO of Apple practically bet the company on the Apple Newton. The idea was that the Newton would have no keyboard, you would write on it to give commands and the Newton would understand your cursive handwriting! Of course, today--almost 30 years later--not only can computers still not read cursive handwriting, but kids don't even learn how to write in cursive anymore. So, you can laugh at John Scully. Oh, what a fool he was, but you are doing the same thing if you think autonomous cars and 3D printed mechanical parts are the way of the future.

It is simply way cheaper to forge, stamp, swage, spin, cast or machine 99% of manufactured parts than to "print" them from powder and nothing is going to change that.

jscpm said:

About six or seven years ago I was one of the speakers at an elites forum and the moderator asked what currently hyped technology would not work, and I named autonomous cars and gave my reasons why. This little speech made me extremely unpopular at the forum because all of the (non-technical) elites were convinced driverless cars were right around the corner, because, hey, that's what the newspapers are saying, and newspapers are always right. Here we are seven years later and self driving cars have progressed no farther than when I gave my speech, and my reasons given then are just as valid today as they were then.

People want to believe this stuff and pour billions into it, but math is math and physics is physics. Just because you saw a self-driving car in Star Wars, doesn't mean it will work in reality.

Back in the 1990s, John Scully, CEO of Apple practically bet the company on the Apple Newton. The idea was that the Newton would have no keyboard, you would write on it to give commands and the Newton would understand your cursive handwriting! Of course, today--almost 30 years later--not only can computers still not read cursive handwriting, but kids don't even learn how to write in cursive anymore. So, you can laugh at John Scully. Oh, what a fool he was, but you are doing the same thing if you think autonomous cars and 3D printed mechanical parts are the way of the future.

It is simply way cheaper to forge, stamp, swage, spin, cast or machine 99% of manufactured parts than to "print" them from powder and nothing is going to change that.

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So your argument is that because technology "A" is taking longer to come to fruition than many thought, and assertion "B" was idiotic ass venting, technology "C" will fail?

I think if you step back a few years and take this same conversation and substitute welder / fabrication for 3d print you could draw a lot of parallels. The pattermaker is nearly a dead trade when once everything was cast, same with the guy shooting rivets into ship hulls. New processes come, the suck while the kinks get worked out, then are used too much, and finally used where it's a best fit.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

In any such analysis it's important to grasp deep fundamental issues. Here are some to think on:

1. It turns out that most people cannot read *their own* hand writing a few months after written. (And this was pretty much known in the time of Newton, which made some of us wonder what they were thinking.)

2. Many people, including me, cannot read their own writing even a few days later.
Given 1 & 2, how exactly is any device, or other person, supposed to make sense of say my scrawling?

This is why all the pressure turned to schemes to replace physical keyboards. My apple watch can accept text entry, but it's not at all reading cursive or even block handwriting, it's a funky letter by letter scheme.

3. Driving is a technically hard, but socially very very hard problem. The "full solution" - which will have any hope of being no more dangerous than humans, will require "common sense" - which it turns out is not common and is hyper difficult to build into an AI system. Hence the stories of self driving cars that see a fire truck, and stop in a such a way as to block the road (resolved when a garbage truck driver ran out and moved the garbage truck.) *SOME* humans would make that sort of mistake too, but not most. And you could yell at them with the loud speaker (I have seen this done by an ambulance.)

It's important to realize that some of the "great triumphs" of AI are "arranged" like a trade show demo. GPT-3 puts out some amazing text. But a researcher made a hilarious set of examples by asking it questions no human would see as valid:

"
D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt?

gpt-3: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016.
"

There is an issue of "outer context" here - and it will plague AI for some time.

4. Some analogies to other technologies fall flat badly. The worst example is the people claiming that an aircraft can take off, fly, and land by itself - and that this bodes well for self driving road vehicles. Turns out this analogy is utter nonsense, even though the technical statement is sort of true. First off that flight would have been preplanned by a corps of licensed dispatchers, and approved by ATC - imagine having to have a licensed person plan out your route to work (EVERY DAY) and then having to call a central planner to get it approved (EVERY DAY).

Second, those fancy auto-pilots are not actually trusted for takeoff (judgement on when to abort is left to humans), and will auto-fault out if there's much wrong with the plane (often pitching it in to a bad attitude) or weather is bad, or it's just unhappy.

In route changes are *negotiated* between pilots and ATC.

Auto-pilots and flight management systems no more fly a plane from one place to another than VMCs make parts all by themselves without programming, setup, supervision or QC.

5. 3D printing faces the CAM limitations of CNC, the process issues of welding, and some deep fundamental physical issues - it's in effect welding rather than wrought or forged material.

In my (limited) experience 3D printers require as much or more attention to get set up to make a useful part as a CNC mill. They CAN make shapes that would be absurd to machine or even cast, and in materials (soft rubbery plastics) that are not practical to machine. So they are very very useful. (As are casting, grinding, edm, ecm, welding, bolted fabrication, adhesive, rivets....)

There are strong reasons you see 3D printing demoed making hyper difficult heat exchangers (see Titan) - [and also papers about no real 3D printer can yet print what is actually wanted...]
Or printing complex shapes out of soft plastics. They're simply uncompetitive or useless for other things.

Will 3D printing change the economy and the world? It already has. Will it wipe out machining, casting, fabrication in the next 10 or 50 years? No.

bryan_machine said:

In my (limited) experience 3D printers require as much or more attention to get set up to make a useful part as a CNC mill.

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WHAT?

How many tools did you touch off to run your 3d printer?

Halcyon said:

So your $9/day 3d printer operator won't cost you too much money before he goes home to his Amazon sponsored 3d printed hibernation tube that he shares in shifts with 2 other workers.

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Shame on you! I almost spit coffee all over my monitor when reading that bit about "his Amazon sponsored 3d printed hibernation tube that he shares in shifts with 2 other workers".

Of course it's funny now but with the way these greedy bastards think it may someday become reality along with him eating Soylent wafers for his dinner.

bryan_machine said:

This is why all the pressure turned to schemes to replace physical keyboards. My apple watch can accept text entry, but it's not at all reading cursive or even block handwriting, it's a funky letter by letter scheme.

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Yeah, technology still has quite a ways to go understanding we humans. The voice command in my car will change the radio station if I tell it to switch climate control modes.

Even OCR, which has been around for quite some time often puts "scanos" (the OCR equivalent of typos) into outputs that have to be manually corrected by the hew-man bean. Still useful as it saves about 97% of the work involved in manually typing the text.

IMO although the machines save a lot of labor humans will always be needed for the percentage they don't handle well.

Where I work we've used a fair number of printed parts over the years. We've been disappointed with every one and none has been used in any volume. They missed on appearance. They missed on precision. They missed on long term stability. They missed on strength. They missed on cost. I don't think you should be selling your conventional machines just yet.

I want 3d printed molds for zinc die casting. Being able to rapidly and cheaply make accurate zinc die castings would be absolutely amazing for making machine components.

Strostkovy - I own a machine made by Z-corp (decades old, it sits in a corner) - said machine printed a "sand" flask, which was at least good enough for pouring aluminum castings. (It was used to make aluminum race engine parts - things like water impellers.)

The process, I think, was called Z-cast.

Note that what it printed was the mold (you had to apply shrink rules, etc.) So casting metal could be poured straight in. (I'm not 100% sure what they did for cores, the project was in the UK I just happened to invest in it.)

I don't know if it would work for zinc or not. (What's the actual alloy? Does it pour hotter than aluminum? Z-cast wasn't good enough for cast iron...)

This was all circa 2001 to 2005, so the market will have moved on.

So if you search around, there likely *IS* a machine/process/material that can 3D print a mold good enough for a decent casting - at least in aluminum.

But Die-casting is a different kind of tooling and a different alloy, right? Isn't it closer to injection molding plastic?