Towards the *fully* 3D-printed electric cars.

Today, I would like to print a copy of keys which cannot be made at the keymakers anymore.

/BAH

Could you be any more vague?

--
Jim Pennino

"Vague"? Do you not know what jewelry and such are?

--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the 
 truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong." 
                               -- Thomas Jefferson

Why on Earth would anyone print jewelry? Plastic jewelry? ...or are you going to print gold? BTW, I'd like to see you print hardened steel and water companies, too.

Do try to keep up. The question was "what do people make at home?" The question was not "What are people 3D-Printing at home?"

That being said, why not? Where do you get the silly idea that

3D-printing only works for plastics? People are 3D-printing rocket combustion chambers and you think 'hardened steel' is a problem?

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar 
 territory." 
                                      --G. Behn

I can see a few, very few, people printing junk jewelry, mostly teenage girls.

I can't see anyone printing an electric, gas, or water company.

Tools and gadgets are so vague they are meaningless.

--
Jim Pennino

You really do have a short attention span, don't you? Probably ADHD.

Do try to pay attention. Maybe if you took notes.

3D printing actually is quite useful as part of a bespoke jewellery-making process. You design a 3D model using a CAD program such as Jewelsmith, print a positive, then use investment casting to produce a one-time mold, which is used to mold precious metal.

Tools? I just 3D-printed a fixture for stencil printing a PCB. It holds a small panel (snaps into the mounting holes) and has cutouts to allow the PCB to sit flat after parts have already been mounted on the other side. Crude but more than good enough. A machinist would have charged me perhaps $500 and taken days. And I would have gotten bogged down in toolpaths and cutter compensation and such like programming it myself in a CAM program.

--sp

--
Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

Lack of content noted.

Lack of content noted.

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar 
 territory." 
                                      --G. Behn

If you want to see a tool someone made at home, look in the mirror.

--
You are  
What you do  
When it counts.

You can't understand more.

You can't understand more.

Yep, it will revolutionize the jewelry business...

Something housewives across the continent have been clamoring for.

--
Jim Pennino

Yes. Yes I could.

Things. People will make things. All of the things.

Perhaps, but have you been to a craft store in the last 5 years? They've been selling commercial 2d robotic cutters for many years that are about the size of an ink-jet printer. The stupid thing shows absolutely no sign of stopping even though the "cartridges" which contain the cutting patterns are DRM protected and *very* expensive. They are mostly used by people who like to do scrap books, but others use them for making their own greeting cards and etc.

In those same craft stores is a large jewelery making section. Those "memory bracelets" people make are a hot thing because "every item on it represents a memory". In other words, these things are already highly customized.

So, I wouldn't discount the notion that the crafts stores might start selling very small 3d metal printers for making little dangling things for jewelery (memory bracelets, necklace charms, and etc.) since this would drop right into the market-space. They would only need to print at most 3" x 3" x 3" to cover 99% of the jewelery market.

That same metal printer would sell "big league" at game stores where custom cast characters for board games are already a huge market. In other words Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40k, and etc. Even if an individual player wouldn't want one, every damn game store on the planet would want at least a couple.

Jeff

--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.   
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,  
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

If the printer can do it, it will happen. Mr & Mrs Random own a piece of go ld jewellery, but would rather have something different. They can wade thro ugh Hatton Garden, buy what they want at full retail and get scrap value fo r their existing gold, or can reprint it using a design chosen online witho ut losing $1000, paying $10-$100 to use the design. Not too hard to see whi ch wins.

mmkay

maybe in your world. I'm not convinced many 3d printed tools will be good, but who knows.

NT

I'd have thought it more likely they would sell thermal wax 3D printers to make the master for a lost wax casting in silver or other metal.

Then they would offer a service to cast the good ones to order.

Maybe. I'd have thought a paintable plastic would be OK for this though.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

Craft people like working in all materials. That's one of the reasons they came up with metal clay -- clay material that when fired creates actual metal items.

So 3D printers for metal, plastic, glass, anything, they'll be up for that.

--
                      Sea Wasp 
                        /^\ 
                        ;;;	 
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com  Blog:  
http://seawasp.dreamwidth.org

Any bets on what his response will be, Jeff? I'm betting it will include the word 'niche', 'crap', or both. You see, the entire world falls in those categories unless it is something we've been doing since the 1930s...

--
You are  
What you do  
When it counts.