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

No, for everything, actually.

True but irrelevant, since 'sales price' can be anything the manufacturer cares to charge.

He has already shown he does not have any.

I was estimating that size of the engine based on cited high horsepower for the Tesla cars. But I was surprised the mass and volume required for the Tesla electric motor is much smaller than a comparable gasoline engine. This video makes a comparison of a Tesla electric motor to a typical gas engine. The power to weight ratio is 10 times better for the Tesla electric motor(!)

How does an Electric Car work ? | Tesla Model S.

The video gives the weight of the Tesla motor as 31.8 kg for 270 kW of power. The size of the motor visually looks like it just might fit within the 14"x14"x14" manufacturing box of the DeskTop Metal's Production machine, though the rotor's central driveshaft might have to be produced at an angle to make use of the full diagonal length of sqrt(3)*14" = 24" inside the box. So instead of needing 27 of the machines I estimated before, we might be able to make it with just a single one:

For a 32 kg = 32,000 gm engine say of steel with a density of 8 gm/cm^3, this is 32,000/8 = 4,000 cm^3. At a production rate of about 8,000 cm^3 per hour, the Tesla engine could be produced in about a half-hour by this single machine.

Bob Clark

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, nanotechnology can now fulfill its potential to revolutionize

Nanotech: from air to space.

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Cost recovery for most materials is trivial.

For 3D metal printing, lots of power.

Babble.

For techniques such as molding, yes.

Pure fantasy.

Pure fantasy and both economic and practical nonsense.

why?

For a start, division of labour makes things much more productive.

Second, choice of materials and fabrication technique are highly non-obvious to non-gearheads. There are big differences between cast, forged, extruded, and HIPped metal parts even with the same composition.

Third, only a small minority of materials are suitable for 3D printing. Doesn't work with leather, wood, or fibreglass, for instance.

Fourth, the range of appearance and surface texture possible with 3-D printing is small. Try making a soda pop bottle that way, or fuzzy bedroom slippers.

Fifth, getting any reasonably smooth surface is either very very slow or requires finishing (sanding or paint or polishing), either of which makes the whole exercise pointless for the end-user. Not to mention heat treatment, annealing, and so on.

Sixth, I get free two-day delivery of anything I want that Amazon sells. For anything much larger than that bedroom slipper, the machine will still be chugging along when the UPS guy arrives.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Whereas home 3d printing will wipe out the labour entirely. Select your pro duct the same way you use Amazon now, and it makes it with no further human input.

Yes, OTOH 3d printing has some structural design advantages. I don't see th at preventing its widespread use.

Of course. Lots of current household goods are plastic only, those could be come 3d printed. Concrete is already 3d printed, and now metal albeit with considerable issues. Hopefully the ongoing development of thermoplastics wi ll enable more goods to be made from them in future than today.

Even today some 3d printers are heated. It's not too hard for the printer i tself to do the vapour phase polishing & annealing.

I'm sure future printers will have many nozzles, not one. I also expect the m to have some other tricks to speed up production. Even a right-now Mad Ma x courier on speed dial isn't going to get your Amazon goods to you in 20 m inutes.

NT

Yadda yadda. "It's digital, it's shiny, it'll change everything!"

Fanboi alert.

You clearly have no idea of the sheer amount of knowledge embodied in modern mechanical and materials engineering, nor of the infrastructure required.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs (who comes from a long line of steel men)

Not true at all. You totally discount both marketing assume a perfect market. People pay more (allowing a higher profit) on "name brands".

TAUTOLOGIES-R-US?

Now you're being silly.

Not really, it's called amortisation, in this case of the cost of the fabricator. "The process of reducing, or accounting for, an amount over a period according to a plan."

And for mature fabrication technology.

Name-calling isn't particularly useful in a discussion. I'd justify my claim (that most people will be fabricating most things) by noting that when almost any technology becomes cheap enough, it becomes ubiquitous, and I'd cite computers, automobiles and printers as examples.

Your turn.

Again, please justify that comment.

I don't think home 3D printing will ever make up a significant portion of manufacturing in part for the reasons you mention, and partly psychology. As you mention there are a lot of things it can't do and materials it can't work with, for the foreseeable future it will only be good for printing random knick-knacks.

And psychologically speaking as a 30-something who knows lots of 20 somethings - the younger crowd doesn't really _want_ random knick-knacks. We don't have room for them, for one thing. We don't live in 4 bedroom homes on 2 acres of land and probably never will. If we're going to spend money we really prefer to spend it on high-quality "botique" stuff that we might have a chance of fitting in the spare 4 square feet we have in our living-cube.

Nobody wants "unlimited plastic honeycomb knives" on demand. Nobody wants to fill their kitchen with 57 3D printed pink plastic sporks. Nobody wants it!

Millennials are frankly fascinated with antiques, stoneware plates, sentimental silverwear their grandmother left to them, durable products, "retro" electronics, and thrift-store clothes. Trying to fit 3D-printing which seems to clam to be the apotheosis of "disposable culture" onto them I think is really going to be trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

What goods do people typically use at home that are made of plastics: storage containers, shelving, dustpan & brush, cookery tools, cutlery tray, bins, plumbing, a limited subset of tools eg spirit levels, clothing, pill ows, mop & bucket, and a fairly wide assortment of practical/decorative ite ms. Even lighting fittings now are often metal plated plastic.

A lot, clearly not all, of the above could be 3d printed. A lot more goods that aren't plastic could be and likely would be if they became much cheape r than the alternatives.

A future printer (decades ahead) could scan discarded plastics for resin ID codes & foreign matter, chop it up into tiny pieces and either use the pow der/chips or extrude it into filament. It could print, vapour polish & anne al goods when desired. Maybe it could also metal plate them. Designs could be selected from websites much like shopping at Amazon, except you don't pa y.

This approach might also go a step further. Instead of buying a dishwasher I might buy a dishwasher kit containing the unprintable parts, ie motors, c ontrol board, switches, sensors & mains lead, and the rest get printed from

?280 plus some assembly time.

A lot of the future is unknown, but it's fair to expect 3d printing to beco me a lot more capable and a lot cheaper over the years. That opens up new o ptions.

As for retro goods, there are nowhere near enough of them to make much of a dent in the market for all types of new goods. It's more likely that some

NT

It is not name calling, it is my opinion of the concept of people fabricating their own things.

Milling machines, drill presses and lathes are quite cheap, especially when compared to metal 3D printers, and are available at your local Harbor Freight store.

How many people do you know that own any of the above?

The concept of everyone making their own stuff went away hundreds of years ago.

Today people making their own stuff is a hobby activity, even for things as trivial as bread.

Those aren't automated, they all require user skill & time. So not a useful comparison.

That's a very weak argument. Future 3d printing has fundamental large differences to home manufacture of previous centuries.

NT

It takes skill and time to learn how to do mechanical design and even to run a CNC machine. Not to mention the investment - time valued money.

The economy of scale isn't there. That's the whole driver behind the industrial revolution. 3D printing isn't going to turn that clock back.

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fferences to home manufacture of previous centuries.

The movement from cottage to factory, ie the industrial revolution, allowed the skills of the few to be imparted to goods for the many. So it solved t he variable skill problem, mostly. It also made production cheaper via expe nsive high output machinery and people trained to do just one task.

Now fast forward to 3d printing. The skill set is in the files, when you cl ick on a product you can see its appearance and see user comments - is it d urable, does it work well, could it be improved etc. So the skill issue is solved, just in a different way. You can choose well designed competent pro ducts.

Regarding labour, its cost is removed entirely. When you click the desired product, the machine does the rest. Of course that's not how it is today, b ut there's every reason to believe in perhaps 30 years time 3d printing wil l be that easy. All the choices are in the files, you need do nothing more than dump your household rubbish in the hopper and click on the product tha t it shows you have the necessary materials and printer abilities for.

Thus it will be one more step forward in economic efficiency. And let's fac e it, for all the babble about quality it's price that rules for a high per centage of consumer purchases.

NT

It also centralized the investment in tooling. Something that your 3D printing dream would have to turn around.

But there is no economy of scale in this dream. If each person is going to modify the widget to suit his needs, he will also have to be a mechanical engineer to make those changes. That's not the way the world works.

The machine is free? The consumables are free? The education is free?

You've shown no evidence that there is any reduction in cost. In fact, you're adding to it by distributing the cost of manufacturing.