There has been so much hype about 3D printing lately. Thanks to some big manufacturers of 3D printers and their incredibly successful marketing campaign, led to many of us believe that a 3D printer is just like any normal paper printers that magically makes 3-Dimensional objects at the click of the ‘Print’ button. Well sometimes(about 10% of the time maybe?) it might actually really be the case, most of the time what your mind conjures of 3D printing is far from the reality. So this post is written for the early adopters on impulse to buy a 3D printer and try it out. Read this before you plunge the money.
Before anything can be 3D printed, it has to be first made in digital format, also known as Computer Assisted Drawing(CAD) files. There are a number of open-source 3D renderer such as SketchUp, Blender, Solidworks, Maya, Z-Brush, Rhino etc. You can quickly download any of which and learn to draw a cube or sphere in 3D. It looks really exciting and fun! But after the initial piece of cake, the truth sets in: Many of us don’t have the perseverance and time to create the next IronMan suit. The ability to create a design that is 3D printable and at the same time aesthetic appealing is actually a really steep learning curve. Why? Here are the reasons:
1. CAD is tough to master
Being good at 3D modeling is harder than just being able to draw a beautiful sketch. It takes literally thousands of hours of trial and error to just to be able to accurately model something out of your imagination. After which you have to worry about component functionality, aesthetics, manufacturability and adequate tweakings. Did i forgot to mention complex organic shapes or intricate mechanical assemblies?
2. Industrial Design is a tough discipline
For the majority, even if we were given the world’s most advanced 3D printer that makes flawless parts out of any materials of our choice, we still can’t quite make a functional lighter or simple multi purpose toolkits. Those trained industrial designers spend years to study designs, real application tradeoffs, hundreds of linkage types, hinges and joints. Even seemingly simple lego cubes involves many complicated design considerations just to make sure it forward-backward compatible with other lego cubes.
3. Material engineering is just another strange beast
Did you know, just for plastic materials alone, there are at least 18 different grades of plastics industrially viable for 3D printing? Some of which are Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene(ABS), Polylactic Acid(PLA), Polyproplyene, Engineering Plastics, PMMA… confusing yet? Some of these materials are wobbly and easy to bend and some are hard as bricks. Even trivial items such as plastic iPhone cases makes use of carefully placed ribs, gussets and bosses to hold parts together. Engineering principles like these will just backfire at you if you simply go ahead with 3D printing designs without thorough deeper understandings.
4. 3D printing materials cost a bomb
Yea sure, current low cost printers cost a measly 2,000USD and below. But unless you are only going to print once and chunk it deep below your underground closet, you are going to be spending big on purchasing printing materials alone. For your reference, the cheapest print material, ABS plastics cost US$59 per kilogram. Composite(powder plastics) costs US$180 per kilogram. PMMA plastics costs US$600 per kilogram. Don’t even bother asking for the costs of copper printing material. The worst part is, any defects that is remotely related to deficiency in point 1 to 3 earlier will render you a failed print product, wasting further print materials in the process. If 3D printing is just your hobby, its going to be a really expensive hobby.
If you haven’t thought about these problems, don’t just go buying a 3D printer immediately thinking any problems will just solve itself in time to come. Most likely it won’t. The truth is, while media frenzied that 3D printing is going to be the next big revolution, this revolution wont happen so soon, and it won’t happen to many of us who doesn’t have the expertise to tame this beast in the first place. Just like Photoshop, anyone can buy the software, but not everyone can make the best use of it.
Shapify 