The 3D printer has not become the household appliance its most avid enthusiasts predicted in the early 2010s, but it is making definite inroads into mass markets. While CAD file creation primarily remains the province of trained, skilled technicians, consumer 3D printing has taken off in schools. Finally, even though most people may not print their own, 3D printed products are emerging in more markets every year.
In the past fifteen years or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in taking things apart (and possibly voiding the warranty) as well as in creating things at home or in school. At a time when shop classes declined in popularity in US schools, in part because high schools emphasized pre-college educations for most students, a bottom-up “maker culture” has emerged. This culture has flourished for many reasons:
Dale Dougherty cofounded O’Reilly Media (a leading publisher of technical manuals for web and open-source software), founded Make magazine, and launched the Maker Faires. He speaks of making as an essential human trait: everyone who cooks, knits, or gardens is a maker, in his view, but there is a historically American variation that emphasized tinkering. While the ability to construct a house, fix a car, or sew your own clothes was once a necessity, he finds that people “are finding their lives enriched by creating something new and learning new skills.” While his magazine has helped create the larger movement, maker culture is also a creature of social media. The internet, in turn, spurs people to connect in real life, to see what each other has built and to learn how they did it.2
A milestone in desktop 3D printing was the RepRap project. Launched in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath, RepRap (replicating rapid-prototyper) is an open-source 3D printer that is designed to replicate itself, that is, to print the plastic parts of another 3D printer.3 As of 2018, kits were available for $300 and up; a particularly popular variant by Josef Průša of Prague runs $599 and was shipping 6,000 units per month in 2018.4 Commercial entities also are free to use the design without giving back to the community, since the open license does not legally preclude this behavior.
RepRap gained commercial momentum in 2007, and many consumers report that this machine provided their first exposure to home 3D printers. The community source documentation and software have both steadily improved, so the RepRap has become, in its high-end incarnations, an extremely capable 3D printer. The same holds true for the entire category: machines costing less than $1,500 can challenge “professional” machines selling for two to four times that price, creating a dilemma for machine manufacturers.
Another open-source project, based in Colorado, originates with Aleph Objects, a company of more than two hundred people. The LulzBot TAZ 6 is priced at $2,500 (a miniature version costs half as much) but is sophisticated enough to be used in engineering applications. The full-size LulzBot has a larger build envelope than most desktop printers and includes other features aimed at improving reliability and usability. In a market where many manufacturers lock down software or require proprietary filament/powder, the LulzBot runs on open-source software that can be modified by the user and will never be locked down by the manufacturer; nearly fifty different filaments from multiple sources were available on the company’s website.5
Against this broader backdrop, the emergence of low-cost, easy-to-operate 3D printers enables makers to do new things, and it captures sales from individuals, schools, and other shared resources that seek to inspire STEM education and to empower individuals to create more of their own environment. In addition, as people across the world continue to migrate to cities, the lack of garages and basements in apartment and condominium buildings creates the opportunity for shared spaces (such as TechShop) to provide access to tools and resources much as a health club sells membership by the month or by the drop-in visit. Science/technology museums are adopting the same approach for young visitors in some workshops, providing tools, instruction, and open-ended encouragement rather than featuring only tightly defined hands-on exhibits that teach a prespecified lesson.
This infrastructure, both social and physical, is important. A 3D printer in the home shop or basement is likely to sit idle after the novelty wears off in many households. In a school or maker space, however, that same printer benefits from the community of makers and learners. In a context of software, measurement instruments, cutting tools, computers, and people with various needs and ideas, the printer is set into a larger creative and productive milieu where a variety of tools can be utilized in combination to get things done.
O’Reilly Media began publishing Make magazine in 2005, and 3D printing has frequently been featured. The most notable example was an “ultimate guide to 3D Printing” in 2012, and the magazine’s website is regularly updated with product comparisons, sample projects, and other resources. As of early 2018, more than forty models had been reviewed, at prices ranging from $350 to $4,000.6
What are people actually making? No systematic answer appears to emerge from the academic literature. Make suggested more than one hundred household items in 2015; many are of dubious usefulness. In part, this lack of plans reflects the low cost and wide availability of commercial molded-plastic items. It will take time for imagination (and, to some extent, design software) to catch up to the capabilities of the fabrication technology. The Make survey went room by room through the house: a lemon squeezer or custom cookie-cutter for the kitchen, soap dishes or razor-holders for the bathroom, lots of plastic game pieces for the rec room, and plastic desktop organizers for the home office.
The contrast with industrial items is instructive. Manufacturers of additive manufacturing machines were asked, “How do your customers use the parts built on your AM [additive manufacturing] systems?” The main answers, with percentage of responses:
Note that functional parts, where many household items would fit, is a minority of the usage in engineering and related settings. Few households need architectural models, casting molds, or other tooling for mass production. This disconnect might help explain the dramatic slowdown in consumer adoption of 3D printers, and the capital markets’ disappointment in companies like MakerBot (now owned by Stratasys). These consumer-facing companies helped create high expectations in 2014–2015, when the promise of mass numbers of home printers drove valuations up to dizzying levels. Now, things are more mundane. John Kawola is North American president for 3D printing company Ultimaker. Regarding the early hype, he made an apt comparison: “Saying there would be 3D printers in every home would be like saying every home has a sewing machine. Just the people who sew have sewing machines.” As it turned out, home 3D printers have been purchased by savvy, capable enthusiasts, not the mass market, because it’s still pretty complicated to translate vision to reality. “There aren’t very many killer apps for the regular guy to make stuff,” Kawola added.8
One class of home-printed items holds great promise: broken plastic pieces, whether tent stakes, shower-curtain hooks, or knobs. Generating prints of these things requires either a good 3D scanner (currently costing anywhere from less than $100 to more than $50,000) or a digital file from either the original manufacturer or some other source. (Intellectual property issues emerge quickly; they will be discussed in chapter 6 in more detail.) Teenage Engineering, a Swedish company that sells inexpensive synthesizers, began offering replacement parts as CAD files in 2012. If the customer lacks a 3D printer, a company called Shapeways will print the file, then mail the output.
A survey of consumers by the Get3DSmart consultancy in 2014 produced some revealing sentiments. Overall, consumer awareness seemed low, which is unsurprising. The biggest group, 49 percent of those surveyed, replied to the question “What about 3D printing seems most interesting?” by saying that “it helps make products available that might not be otherwise.” This is the so-called “long tail” at work: much as Netflix (in its DVD days), eBay, and YouTube have a small number of hits and vast numbers of niche- (or zero-) audience items available, so too do many fans of 3D printing see an escape from retail uniformity that is necessitated by mass production and mass marketing. Customization was listed by about a fifth of respondents, then 16 percent noted “the ability to watch products being made” as being most interesting. Fourteen percent cited sustainability. Taken together, these results fit in with a growing resistance to mall-based retail, a growing “green” sensibility, and a desire for uniqueness in one’s personal possessions.9
It will be important to differentiate between consumer demand for 3D printers and for 3D printed goods, whether medical devices, footwear, decorative items, jewelry, or whatever. As more production, including customization, moves onto additive platforms, tastes will change to create more demand for everything from customized trophies (“Mom, that’s me!”) to better-fitting shoes to custom car seats (research has shown that people can be uniquely identified by the pattern of their sitting, so everyone theoretically needs a unique seat). Predicting consumer trends is impossible, so trying to guess if there will be some “killer app,” as they used to be called, that will drive wider demand for home printers beyond hobbyists seems futile.
Compared to the rhetoric of 2012, when some were comparing 3D printing to the early days of the personal computer movement,10 with the consumer growth rates that implied, sales of desktop printers seem to be migrating to enterprise users. These people have the software, the knowledge, and the stream of work (things that need to be printed for design and prototyping purposes) to sustain the investment. At Ford, engineers have come to rely on the technology for new vehicle development, with more than 100,000 parts printed in 2017.11 Production parts are expected to increase down the line, but the point here is that desktop printers have a more natural home in R&D facilities than in most Americans’ garages.
Consumer products, however, seem like a massive market waiting for production to catch up to latent demand. A quick survey around a household reveals multiple opportunities to improve on mass production:
3D printing is finding its way into many school curricula, where it can help energize students to consider how the worlds of computing and physical fabrication (art, manufacturing, craft) intersect. As employers look ahead, meanwhile, they see the need for a digital manufacturing workforce, and many companies have donated money, expertise, and/or materials to help encourage this set of skills and attributes. To take only one example, GE donated printers to more than four hundred schools as part of a $10 million five-year investment. More than 180,000 students are estimated to be affected. The donation includes a wind-turbine simulation software package so students can learn problem-solving, team collaboration, written and verbal communications, and critical thinking skills in the context of a manufacturing challenge. Seven countries are included: Canada, China, Germany, India, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.15
There are many potential pedagogical benefits. A number of educators16 have identified a cluster of these:
Lots of attention is being paid to futuristic applications of 3D printing, such as human tissue, exoskeletons, or skin. We will address those in chapter 7, but many people are surprised by the degree to which additive manufacturing is already well established. Surgical implants are discussed elsewhere in this book, but two areas of medicine capitalize on the fact that every human is unique, often across the two lateral sides: few people’s feet are the same shoe size, for example.
Dental clinics are using 3D printing to make implants, whether as small as a single crown or as large as a section of someone’s head bones. A key development in this trend is the development of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT), a new imaging technology invented in Italy and commercialized around the year 2000. CBCT facilitates the creation of 3D volumetric models that can be passed to a printer for fabrication. The change has been momentous for dental labs, many of which have been moving to China. A skilled artisan can produce about twelve dental crowns in one day. According to EOS, a German manufacturer of 3D printers, their machines can produce up to 450 crowns in that same one-day period.21 In addition, 3D printing frees the skilled prosthetic-makers to do other, more involved tasks, such as working with enamel.
As a result, many dental offices have installed 3D printers on site, shortening turnaround from weeks (with physical molds and artisanal manufacturing) to a few hours. Additive technologies that create complex structures with little waste are teamed with milling tools that can create high precision connecting surfaces (because of the higher strength obtainable from a solid pouring), combining the best of both worlds.22 In addition, some lower-cost 3D printing technologies are useful for making guides, prototypes, or splints (as with some forms of orthodontia). In these cases, the material might not be sufficiently strong for implantation, or it may not be suitable for autoclaving and other sterilization techniques.
Another major use of additive techniques in dentistry occurs at Invisalign, which is a newcomer to the orthodontic field. The company uses 3D scanning of the mouth to map out a treatment plan, then prints a new set of personalized fixtures in which thin plastic is thermoformed over an additively produced base pattern for each patient to swap out about once a week. The clear fixtures are also removable, and so represent an improvement over manually adjusted wires and metal braces. The company prints an average seventeen million unique aligners annually and sales have been growing at a rate of 30 percent a year as more dentists get familiar with and trained on the system.
Many dental offices have installed 3D printers on site, shortening turnaround from weeks to a few hours.
Metal-capable 3D printing methods are of great interest to dentists. In some cases, printing makes possible the use of hard metals such as cobalt chrome that are hard to work with in traditional dental methods but are desirable for their mechanical and bonding properties. Not being limited to gold gives reconstructive dentists greater design freedom and therefore more clinical flexibility. For all of these advantages, details are still being worked out. What are the practice economics (including insurance reimbursement) of a scanner, a dedicated technician, or a printer (or fleet of printers) in terms of break-even point for return on investment? What are the health and safety considerations of powdered plastics and metals, potentially noxious gases produced by heating those powders, and hazardous and/or biomedical waste? What are the key customer service, financial, and regulatory considerations of buying the service from a lab versus building capacity internally? These answers will become clearer in the coming years, but dentists will remain in the vanguard of additive technology for the foreseeable future.
The other area where 3D printing has been widely adopted is in hearing aids. Just as with dentistry, every fit is a custom one, so the technology makes sense. As of 2013, it was estimated that more than 10,000,000 hearing aids worldwide had been 3D printed; as of 2017, 97 percent of all hearing aids produced worldwide used 3D printing in their manufacture. Once again, economics drove the transition. Cast molds used to be converted into patient prostheses by skilled artisans in a nine-step process that took more than a week. Compare that to the streamlined path from laser scanning (to generate ~100,000 data points of each unique ear) to modeling to printing: a batch of shells can be 3D printed in two to three hours, often using vat polymerization. Both Phonak, a Swiss company, and US-based Starkey use the technology, which has reduced returns (resulting from poor fit) from 40 percent to 10 percent.23
As we have seen, the world of sport provides many opportunities for short production runs of high-performance materials to be subjected to extreme stresses. Few of us drive Formula 1 racing cars or compete in the Olympics, but additive technologies are still finding their way into everyday life. The Robot Bike Co. was started in 2013 by college classmates from Bath University who had graduated into serious engineering jobs but remained connected by their love of mountain biking from fifteen years prior. Robot Bike is able to address a common problem: bike riders come in all shapes, sizes, and abilities, but mass-production bike frames come in only three or four variations. Their solution is to build custom bikes using varying lengths of carbon-fiber tubes combined with 3D-printed titanium lugs. Because different tube lengths dictate different angles for the joints, and different riders generate different loads on the frame, Robot Bike built a sophisticated software front end to optimize bicycle design for each rider, turning measurements and preferences into a build via topology optimization and parametric CAD fed into the third-party additive fabricator’s build-preparation engine.24 While the resulting bike is expensive, reviews have been ecstatic: this new tool in the engineer’s arsenal has helped the innovators at Robot Bike develop an entirely new type of machine, one impossible under former manufacturing constraints.25
It’s hard to envision a 3D printer in most households. That said, it’s not hard to see 3D printing having an impact on many households. The distinction lies in the complexity of making: CAD software and the overall printing process are too hard for casual consumers to pick up. One of my students reported buying a 3D printer and not touching it for more than a year after purchase. At the same time, the number of printers in the Media Commons at Penn State has soared from two to thirty-two over three years, and there are times when use is limited to classwork because the queues were so long (four days as of this writing).
Much of what will drive adoption is familiarity with what is possible. Many millennials resist throwaway culture, so being able to repair household items should drive one strand of uptake. Customization of one’s phone case, key chain, wedding cake, and knife handles can be a second growth area, once familiarity and awareness ramp up along with ease of use. Finally, what might be called “body appliances”—orthotics, joint braces, eyeglasses, earpieces, and so on—combine customization, the need for rapid turnaround, and massive market size: it’s easy to imagine Amazon having measurement kiosks at Whole Foods groceries for these kinds of products. The technologies of scanning, design, and build preparation are getting good enough, as are new printing methods, for such a scenario to make sense. At this juncture, the biggest hurdle is mobilizing public awareness and developing a sustainable yet defensible business model.