April 2009 :: Where we’re at : Desktop Manufacturing

There’s a nice rundown of different types of desktop manufacturing machines over on Replicator

Which will (the way things are going) will seem quaint and old-worldly in a reasonably short period of time. One for the time-capsule methinks. Still… it’s where we are today, Year of Our Lord, the Fourteenth of April, Two Thousand and Nine.

There are missing links out there… the main one that I can see is the ability of a printing (rather than a cutting) technology to create surfaces that are shiny… similar to what we can do with injection moulding today. An Are We There Yet technology… when it arrives it will bring a flood of possibilities in its wake.

I’m not of the opinion (not yet) that 3D manufacturing will ever go mainstream though… take a look around – how many things can you see that are made out of single pieces of plastic? From here I can see a plant pot… that’s about it. Everything else is a combination of very finely engineered plastic and metal… and the plastics are not “a standard part” each item has a very unique recipe – and each metal is an alloy… similarly finely tuned.

I think the coming innovation explosion will happen as a result of hackers/users-who-tinker, feeding their innovations back into a high-tech, light-industrial machine… rather than people turning out the products themselves. We will see some incredibly clever stuff coming out of home-setups, but it won’t be where people go to get their knives and forks.

For a while anyway.

Assuming there isn’t also a sweeping wave of social change in which people decide to go off-grid/local.