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Searching for That Killer App! a New Type of 3D Printing: a 25-Year-Old Technology Has Caught the Fancy of a New Generation of Designers and Engineers

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Searching for That Killer App! a New Type of 3D Printing: a 25-Year-Old Technology Has Caught the Fancy of a New Generation of Designers and Engineers Searching For That Killer App! A New Type of 3D Printing: A 25-year-old technology has caught the fancy of a new generation of designers and engineers. From iPhone cases to customized sake sets, will anything ever be the same again? by Alan S. Brown ALL IT THE Pocket Factory Tour. This past Hornstein spent time at Idealab, a technology incubator January, Bilal Ghalib and Alex Hornstein, two that launched dozens of companies, then moved to Hong A New Type of 3D Printing..... 26-year-old computer science graduates of Kong to start the city’s first private hacker space. After University of Michigan and MIT, respectively, it went belly up, he and Ghalib decided to take their 3D c set out from San Francisco with four inexpensive printers on the road. They called the project Pocket Fac- 3D printers in the back of their Prius. tory. They wanted to discover whether they could make a They had met years ago over the Internet. Ghalib was living by designing, producing, and selling products made building a $50 laser cutter, Hornstein a computer-controlled on their hand-assembled 3D printers. Etch-a-Sketch. Ghalib went on to work on autonomous ve- “We set up in art galleries, parks, and flea markets hicles and set up Egypt’s first hacker space, where people and we make custom belt buckles, iPhone cases, and 3D with common technology interests shared resources and portraits. People could talk to us about the uses they see ideas. for the technology, and we see what they are willing to pay for,” Hornstein said from Salt Lake City. The tour was a hit in San Francisco, where technophiles embraced customized plastic iPhone cases. But a flea market in Victoria, B.C., was a total bust. “They weren’t interested in our story or our products,” Hornstein related. “We had some really nice, polite Canadians come up and tell us, ‘What you’re doing is really stupid.’” Welcome to the world of makers and ubiquitous 3D printers. A growing cadre of enthusiasts believes that one day, practically everyone with a computer will create artwork, kitchen utensils, spare parts, chocolate desserts, and, yes, iPhone cases and belt buckles, from a small machine on their desk. Some dream of printing robots, others changing the design process as we know it. Industrial Strength If this vision sounds far-fetched, then consider how mainframe computer jocks felt when they read the first ads for the Altair 8800 PC kit in Popular Elec- tronics in 1975. The movement attracted hobbyists and visionaries, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Yet PCs did not really take off until the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, was introduced in 1979. It made PCs essential in businesses and, later, homes. Industrial strength 3D printers have grown increasingly capable over the past 25 years, but they are expensive. Think of them as mainframe computers. Ghalib and Hornstein built the MakerBot Thing- O-Matics in the back of their Prius from kits that cost about $1,000. They are equivalent of those 1974 Altairs. As they travel cross country, Ghalib and Hornstein are searching for that killer app, the design or business model that will turn their road trip into a thriving business. They are not alone. Over the past two years, more “Rancho”, one of the MakerBot Thing-O-Matics that Ghalib and than a dozen new companies have jumped into the Hornstein have taken on their road trip. market. Fab shops have opened to make 3D prod- 12 SPRING 2012 THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI A design screen and the “printed article” sake set from Shapeways. ucts. Developers have created software that lets anyone ing out, our layers were 0.5 millimeters thick. Now they’re customize products. And as the gap between industrial and 0.2 millimeters.” hobbyist 3D printers shrinks, visionaries are rethinking The Replicator is a distinct break from the past. To start what might be possible. with, it ships assembled. Pettis could build the Thing-O-Mat- 3D printing is a child of the digital age. It starts with a ic in six hours, but it took newbies 20 to 40 hours to assemble 3D CAD drawing, and slices it into thin layers that it prints it. “Now, when they get the machine, it is a better consumer one at a time. Industrial printers do this by fusing powders experience. We’ve opened the market from people who read or crosslinking resins. The process resembles how a child Make to people who read Wired, people who are interested might build a tall castle one row of Lego bricks at a time. in technology rather than do-it-yourselfers,” Pettis said. Over the past decade, they have grown larger, faster, Replicator also has a bigger build space. “Instead of some- more accurate, and less expensive. They work with a thing you can hold in the palm of your hand, we can make broader range of plastics, ceramics, and metals, including things that take two hands to hold,” he continued. “You can aluminum, titanium, and Inconel. print a life-sized skull from CAT scan data, and make other Once limited to prototypes only, today’s printers churn models that you can use in the real world.” out complex, limited volume, and customized parts. Some, like molds with conformal cooling channels, are nearly Opened The Door impossible to build any other way. Finally, the new machine has two nozzles and can print parts Ghalib and Hornstein do not live in that world. Their in two colors at the same time. This sounds almost trivial, three Thing-O-Matics (they cannibalize one to keep the but once the developers figured out how to do this (by inter- others running) and an Up! are not as sophisticated. They leaving instructions to each printer head), they opened the replicated CAD designs by extruding layers of molten door to printing parts in any number of colors and perhaps plastic three to five times thicker than their industrial in several different materials. counterparts. Pettis recognizes the need for a killer app. He even has a On the other hand, these printers are cheap. MakerBot candidate: Thingiverse.com, a website where the MakerBot Industries prices Thing-O-Matic kits at $1,099. Delta Micro community shares designs. “We weren’t sure what people Factor sells the Up! for $2,600, but it comes assembled. would use our printers for, so we built Thingiverse to see if They are an order of magnitude less than the least expen- a killer app would emerge,” he said. sive industrial printer. In many ways, the killer app is everything. People Equally important, hobbyist printers are closing the per- download files for things as practical as coat hooks and formance gap quickly. “When we started, our printers were smartphone holders. Other times, something seems to catch 60 percent as good as the commercial models at 1 percent Thingiverse’s collective fancy. of the price,” said MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis. He claims “A designer named Zaggo downloaded a design for a his new model, the Replicator, is as fast as commercial 3D whistle, and within half an hour, hundreds of people around printers and has similar resolution. “When we were start- the world were making it. That was the first thing on the site SPRING 2012 THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI 13 that went cra- a castable resin model, a positive of the bracelet. Shapeways zy. The next arranges for someone to dip the model in plaster, then melt day, it was it away. That leaves behind a mold cavity with precise, shower curtain detailed interior structures, he said. rings or some- Other companies have followed Shapeways’ success. thing else,” Pettis recalled. Freedom of Creation, another Dutch company, features Others have built on the community concept. Shapeways an enticing array of lighting, chairs, trays, jewelry, coat is an example. Artists and designers set up online shops and hangers, and smartphone cases. upload their CAD files. When a customer purchases a prod- Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen calls these uct, Shapeways builds it to order fab shops “the democratization of on its 3D printers. The company, Printed Articles production.” He has the numbers which started in the Netherlands, A detailed bracelet from Kevin Wei, top left, to prove it: Shapeways’ member operates a manufacturing facility in contrasts with Cornell’s screen-to-silver, community of 100,000 sold more Eindhoven and plans to open one in bronze and plastic creations in this graphic. than 750,000 products in 2011 alone, New York City in 2012. he claimed. Shapeways uses higher end 3D Weijmarshausen argues that printers. It shows. The products people want custom products. on its website are slick. Some ap- They rebuild their cars, add onto pear handmade. Others are mind- their homes, and paste decals on bogglingly complex. the laptops. 3D printing gives Dutch kinetic artist Theo Jan- them just that, with at least some sen’s Strandbeests are an example of the economies of scale of mass of the latter. Since 1990, he has production. built stunning combinations of Shapeways is pulling out all gears, PVC pipe, and articulat- stops to make its products more ing joints that capture the wind customizable for people who have to walk. For Shapeways, he has never heard of CAD. An example shrunk his giant designs to bread is the Shapeways sake set creator. loaf size. Strandbeests come out of It begins with an image of a the 3D printer fully formed, with deep cup with a pronounced lip. dozens of moving parts, ready to Two sliders on the side determine start their journey without any surface smoothness and the twist of assembly.
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