3d printing technology is i won’t say thegreatest thing ever but it’s pretty great. so the other word you’re going to startseeing a lot more of i think is additive manufacture. 3d printing is kind of a specific style whereyou do layers. but i think you’ll see other additive manufacturingschemes following different fluids and materials that are buoyant those fluids and then extractedand shapes can be created that are not possible,
future uses of 3d printing, impossible to create by subtractive manufacturewhich is what i was brought up with as an engineer. you cut threads in a piece of metal or plasticto get a threaded fastener. you hollow something out.
i often think about the astronauts rock boxesso they took boxes to the moon to put rocks in and bring them back to the earth in a hermeticallysealed fashion. and in order to get the boxes to be lightweightthe machinist’s term is they were hogged out. so they started with a piece of aluminum thisbig, hollowed the whole thing out with a milling machine. chips of aluminum just go on the shop floorto get this thin but yet very, very strong final shape. well in the future or maybe this afternoonvery few of us will manufacture objects like
that subtractively. instead this will be made additively. and it will be lighter weight, cheaper, lesswaste and it will enable many, many people to participate in the additive manufacturedprocess. and then if you have a problem at home wheresomething’s broken, pick a thing. your toaster. you’ll go online, find a new toaster controlknob, maybe a family of designs. you’ll pick the one that you like. you’ll go to the spiritual equivalent offedex/kinkos and they’ll have an additive
manufacturing machine there. if you need a really sophisticated you’llcall a more sophisticated additive manufacturing machine shop. and they’ll make the thing for you. and you will not waste the toaster. you will not throw it away. you will not waste nearly as much material,hardly any material if you hadn’t manufactured the new knob or a piece or a heater wire. and this will allow us to do more with less.
this is democratizing manufacture. in the same way perhaps that art is democratized. people can make music now. people can mix hundreds of musical tracksat home. people can go to the store and buy paintbrushesand paint and canvas. or you can electronically create it. this is democratizing manufacture a more efficientway. and i think there’ll be a very near futurewhere people from my business of mechanical engineering will look around at objects andgo we used to waste all that metal and all
that you just leave it on the shop floor. oh the humanity. and so as that technology matures becausethere’s so – the obvious advantages are so obvious that more and more people willget into the business and it will lower the cost of everything. i have a juicer that belonged to my neighborwho died when she was 86 and the business end, the thing that really does the reamingis chipped. man i look forward to the day when i can scanthat and then additively manufacture a new one and just put it right on the old machine.
i can see it. it’s probably possible now if i put in enoughenergy in finding the right machine shop. i could probably do it right now but i’vegot other things going on. i’ve got to do this right here for example.
