For some time now pretty much everyone who’s actually smart has been talking about how 3D printing is going to be the next big thing.
It feels like it’s at the same stage the internet was in the early 90s.
So we’re about to enter the phase where vast sums will be bet and lost, and made again. All the while old industries will be torn apart and consigned to the dustbin of history.
Now the whole point of 3D printing is you can make things yourself without having to have them shipped from a factory in China.
So the money’s going to be in making the printers.
So I’m interested in what readers think can be done to get Canberra in on a piece of this pie, or if we should even bother?
[Photo by Zeusandhera CC BY 2.0]
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What’s Your opinion?
How do we get 3D printing going in Canberra?
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It’s not often I’d expect something Canberra related to highlight and emphasise technology. Particularly one that may well revolutionise the manufacturing industry- on par with mass sanitation, rather than throwing your mums p00 out the window of an evening.
(Well done RiotACt/johnboy/whomever)
This, along with ink formulation, distribution and supply; and also sintering, curing and solidification of target materials may well localise and liberate the end consumer to a degree we’ve never imagined.
It may well make a city of useless, overpaid, under-worked socialist breeding ground of unnecessary Public Servants partially worthy of their existence.
Get onto it.
nhand42 said :
Whats the real cost for something like that in canberra?
i gather most of the parts would be off the internet?
Myles Peterson said :
Forget pirating DVDs, I wanna pirate a DVD player! 🙂
you wouldn’t download a car…
I built my 3D printer last year and successfully printed another 3D printer in December.
There’s a Canberra forum on the reprap website
http://forums.reprap.org/list.php?256
You can discuss builds and parts. I’d like to organise some meets but interest has been low.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=onA-wZt3Zjk&NR=1
Reprap is kinda oldish now.
You can get the kit for about $500 to make your own. But the quality isnt there. Its kinda gimicy, the quality in terms of a dot matrix printer and the speed of one today compared to a high quality inkjet
With the professional machines (the youtube video) they are more like the fine ness of of the inkjet because they basically are.
They print out one layer at a time and then lay over a fine layer of printable power and mix it with ink like a inkjet. They cost between $10,000 – $100,000.
There was also a great XKCD http://xkcd.com/924/
I was under the impression that ANU had a very high end 3D printer that pretty much does nothing most of the day. Some guys I know who do 3D CG mentioned it a while back as they were looking at punching out some Z-Brush figurine sculpts.
If you want to know exactly how the machines work, there is a 9 minute movie on http://www.printo3d.com which shows how a small plastic goblet is made.
Get a makerbot thingomatic and off you go. It’s an amazing process to watch the more expensive ($20k plus) machines making something out of a bowl of liquid silicon.