You mean other than the fact that there's already affordable, off-the-shelf 3D printers available with large and growing libraries of free things to print?
Nothing out there is affordable and readily available enough to make strong tools, or even ones with movable parts as far as I know. Not on a "every-household-can-own-one" yet at least.
What I was saying was that someday in the future, it would be cool if they could give us a machine that would let us print our own products that we would normally go out an buy on a much larger scale than the little parts or plastic sculptures of today's machines.
I apologize, but I wish you would reconsider your "conspiracist slant". What I mean is, there are a lot of people who believe the same thing as you, and this lack of faith inhibits growth and innovation.
Enough people say it either can't be done, would be shut down by some black gov't/corp agency, or otherwise inconceivable. Then they talk others out of the idea.
I realize this sounds insulting and don't mean it that way, but have found that a lot of people who share a similar attitude do not have a grasp on what is already out there.
This is NOT so much of a manufacturing machine. It could manufacture some basic goods, but other processes such as injection molding, extrusion, spin casting, etc already exist and are much more suited to manufacturing.
People see an adjustable wrench come out and think they can just pump out all their own goods. Not so fast.
It is a rapid prototyping machine, that's it. Thus allowing an engineer to build a prototype for testing and eventual mold making.
It's a significant step up from my machinist training days. At that point you had basic cnc carving into a wax block. This was handy way to analyze not only physical shape/size of a part but also to analyze your tool programming/paths/speeds etc. You may find a way to trim several minutes off by using a different path with less code, spot errors before destroying an expensive billet/casting, or ensure tolerances.
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Jay Leno showed one of these used to produce parts for his steam car that had long went out of production.
A friend of mine is a "reverse engineer", mostly for legitimate purposes such as restoring/creating a blueprint of a part that was lost/destroyed/never existed. The scanning technology made things MUCH faster than using vernier calipers and other hand measuring tools. Those too have went down significantly in price, and are trickling into the high end hobbyist workshop.
Oh I know this is far from something that's going to revolutionize the world. Right now, all it is, is like you said, something to just make a prototype, or model of something, or maybe a small part. But this technology has been rapidly developing lately. There are companies out there that use CNC machines to cut out parts, and companies like this one, who do the same with plastics.
There are companies like Shapeways that will 'print' you objects you send them for a fee out of all kinds of materials. As we saw in a previous post here on Garage Journal, some guy just modeled some part he needed that the company wanted way too much money for and had it printed instead.
It's only a matter of time before this technology becomes affordable enough that hypothetically anyone could just buy one for themselves as if it were an inkjet printer.
It is also conceivable that as the technology evolves, it will be able to create more and more complex objects.
And well down the road, there is no reason we won't all be able to start printing all kinds of stuff, out of all kinds of materials. Maybe machines of the future could even heat treat the items it creates.
I see problems arising in a similar way to how they have arisen in the music industry for example. As soon as computers and the internet became mainstream and usable by most of the public, people started using their computers to share music with each other on a scale that basically made the music industry **** themselves!
They saw it as a threat to their existence, and responded by trying to sue everyone like crazy. They weren't prepared for such a change in their world where their 'product' could be had by anyone without them getting paid for it.
When they finally started to join the game instead of fight it (selling music legally through services like iTunes), they have tried like crazy to control every aspect of how the file is used through DRM.
They have even somehow got companies like Microsoft and computer manufacturers to work with them, severely limiting the way our own property works!
Did you know on many new Dell laptops for example, they have physically disabled the ability to "record from wave"? It used to be, you could record any sound coming out of your speakers directly from your sound card.
Despite all of the legal uses this had, from editing video, and audio, to just recording a Skype conversation, all they saw was that some kid could record his or her favorite song onto their computer (God forbid!)
Microsoft has also built in all kinds of deterrents and DRM into their Vista and 7 OS's.
Comcast has been caught slowing down users who use BitTorrent, even though it also has plenty of legal uses.
So you can see what the response was from multiple companies when a 'product' was being "stolen". Even with no actual product being stolen, they saw each 'copy' as money lost on their part.
So you can imagine what the response might be from say, Snap-On if someone were to scan one of their ratchets and upload it for free on the internet, and mechanics all just print their own.
Do they own that 'image' of their ratchet? It's the machine that's producing it, but I'm willing to bet they would see it as a 'lost sale' like the music industry does.
And legal or not, it will lead to regulation, and limitation, etc.
But instead of just being a few companies with a vested interest, like what happened with music, this would involve just about every mass producing company out there.
When people can hypothetically in the future print their own products, there will be a lot of fighting, suing, and regulation going on.
If the companies do see this as a threat before hand they may even take steps to prevent private ownership or regulate the use of these machines with their high priced lawyers.
But this is all hypothetical, I'm well aware, we're not even close to at the point where any of this is going to happen anytime soon.
I just see it as both something awesome to look forward to, but also something that's going to cause a lot of problems too.
