Ask Nick: Applications for 3-D printing are endless
- Is 3-D printing perfect%3F No. But there are some pretty exciting things in development.
- 3-D printing has gone from printing in one color to two colors and now even using chocolate.
Question: What is this 3-D printing I keep hearing about? What is it for?
Answer: In regular computer printing — the kind with which we're all familiar — you basically take an image on the screen of a document you've created, and recreate that image on the paper in the printer. Essentially, you're just reproducing the thing you see on the screen, onto the paper. That's 2-D (two dimensional) printing. 3-D (three dimensional) printing is pretty much the same idea, but adds that third dimension so that you print a solid, physical object — something that you can hold in your hand, like a statue — rather than just an image on a piece of paper.
As you can imagine, you can't just use a word processor to create the image that you print. You need a specialized software program called a Computer Aided Design (or CAD) package to design the image on your computer screen. When these things were first designed, in the early 1980s, both the CAD programs and the actual 3-D printers themselves were very expensive. They were mostly used by large corporations to design and prototype new parts. Once those prototypes were known to work properly, the parts were then mass manufactured by traditional manufacturing methods.
The 3-D model in the computer can also be created by using a 3-D scanner to scan an object that already exists. This is not tremendously accurate, and often requires a lot of touching up before the model can be printed.
Once that 3-D model is in the computer, it can be sent to the 3-D printer. There are a lot of different types of 3-D printers. The most common ones (including the one on the International Space Station!) use a certain type of plastic heated and forced (extruded) through a nozzle to lay down a thin layer of plastic in the right shape. It then goes back and does the next layer, and the next, and the next, until a solid 3-D thing is built up. Others use a similar build-up process, but use lasers to melt metal instead of plastic. There's a Chinese company that has developed a 3-D printer that uses what they're calling "liquid metal," which sounds a little too Terminator for my taste.
3-D printing is starting to come down in cost to the point where small companies and many individuals are buying them. There are a lot of companies making 3-D printers that cost less then $2,000. Some even cost less than $1,000. Companies like MakerBot (http://www.makerbot.com/), Cubify (http://cubify.com/cube), and even Dremel (https://3dprinter.dremel.com/) offer printers that you can buy directly from them, from places like Amazon, and some are even available from Home Depot.
What can you make from them? Well, pretty much anything you can imagine. Toys, replacement game pieces, rings — whatever. If you're not terribly good with a CAD program yet, you can always download pre-created designs from places like Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com/) or Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/). You'll find some pretty clever things being designed by some pretty clever people.
3-D printing isn't perfect. It's slow, you're limited as to the size of the finished piece, and you may have to do a bit of sanding and smoothing of the finished product, but remember, these are early days yet. The printers get better with every iteration, and I think we'll be seeing some pretty exciting things. We started out with single plastic extruders, so everything you printed was just one color (of course, you could paint it). Now there are two-color printers, and even 3-D printers that print using chocolate!
If a 3-D printer is a little rich for your blood, you can dip your toe in with a 3-D pen. 3doodler (http://the3doodler.com/), LIX (http://lixpen.com/), and CreoPop (http://www.creopop.com/) are just a few of the companies making them. 3doodler has it right; they're more for doodling in 3-D than for making serious, usable things, but they're an awful lot of fun!
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the companies making cars (http://3dprint.com/53532/chinese-3d-printed-car/) and houses (http://www.businessinsider.com/3d-printed-houses-construction-industry-neighborhoods-2015-3) with 3-D printers. There's a lot of potential in 3-D printing for our future.
If you want to see 3-D printing in action, look into Rochester's own Hackerspace, Interlock Rochester (http://www.interlockroc.org/). This is a dynamic, interesting, eclectic group of people — do yourself a favor, and check it out.