Tag Archives: 3D-printing

RepRap creates circuits

just-finishedA moment of history. The RepRap project has created circuits for the first time:

Ed and I have a final-year student – Rhys Jones – who’s working on RepRap for his MEng research project. He’s been taking the old idea of depositing metal in channels and an observation of Forrest’s and Nophead’s (that you don’t need a low-melting-point alloy because the specific heat of metals is so low that they shouldn’t melt the plastic anyway).

Also worth a look: Bruce Sterling points to Darwinian Marxism as a means of ensuring the proletariat gain possession of the means of production sans revolution.

[via the Yorkshire Ranter][image from the Reprap blog]

Fabbing your new fingerbones

X-ray of a human handWhile 3D printing may be used predominantly for rapid prototyping of consumer goods (with all the potential risks that entails), it may turn out to have more humanitarian deployments as well. Proving a concept we mentioned a while back, a team of Swiss doctors have used a 3D printer to build replacement bones for a man’s thumb:

Weinand loaded the printer with tricalcium phosphate and a type of polylactic acid – natural structural materials found in the human body. The resulting bone “scaffolds” contained thousands of tiny pores into which bone cells could settle, grow and eventually displace the biodegradable scaffold altogether.

The bones still have to be ‘grown’ around the scaffold (using a surrogate mutant mouse, much like the famous Vacanti ear experiment), so it’s not a completely non-biological process. But it’s a step closer to a world where we can buy spare parts for our meat-machines ‘off the shelf’. [image by ansik]

Caveat emptor: news reports from the Age of Direct Digital Manufacturing

Sven Johnson’s Future Imperfect returns with more news from our very near future. You’ve heard of fabbing or 3D printing, right? Won’t it be amazing when anyone and everyone can become a designer – a web-based brave new world of commerce?

Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

Well, not necessarily. Sven looks at the disconnect between the old model of pre-corporate capitalism and the new model that a Fabrication-on-Demand industry will produce. In a nutshell: it’s the consumers who’ll run the greatest risks, without any of the safety nets provided by an up-to-date suite of intellectual property laws.

Continue reading Caveat emptor: news reports from the Age of Direct Digital Manufacturing

Personal fabber for US$15k plus materials

Following on from yesterday’s post about fabbing your own military hardware, you may be wondering exactly how much of a dent the cutting edge of consumer level 3D-printing technology would put in your pocketbook.

The answer? A personal fabber will cost you just a shade under US$15,000, though the actual printing materials are extra.

uPrint 3d printer/fabber

Ain’t a lot of money when you think about what it can do, is it? Certainly cheap enough that a reasonably organised criminal syndicate or terror organisation would consider it small change… [via Bruce Sterling; image courtesy Dimension Printing]