3D PRINTING GETS REAL

After the hype, a technology finds its purpose

SO WHERE ARE we now? One day soon, we’ve been told over the last decade or so, we’ll all have 3D printers in our living rooms! You can make whatever you want!! But we don’t, and you can’t.

“With every technology, you have the hype cycle. Right now we’re sort of at the bottom, because the hype is over,” says Joris Laarman, a Dutch designer who has engineered new types of digital-fabrication materials and whose work is the subject of an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. “People are kind of like, ‘Okay, so? What can we do with it? Was it real or was it just hype?’ ”

Well, for some it hasn’t been just hype. Laarman uses 3D printing to create functional, usable furniture called micro structures. Spacex has a dedicated 3D printing zone at its plant in Hawthorne, California. GE’S Brilliant Factory aims to use 3D printing to transform large-scale manufacturing.

But where is 3D printing for the rest of us?

value of those tho in the business isn’t that high,” says Kavanagh. K

And yet in some communities, basic works. Ron Smith teaches welding and engineering at Nestucca Junior/senior High School Schoo in Cloverdale, Oregon. His 3D printer? prin An Afinia H480, a now-discontinued now-discont desktop model he’s had since 2014. 20 At the end of the year, each student studen gets to design his or her own keepsake, keepsak something small that they want just ju for themselves. “These are some of the tools I can use to get kids interested, to go on to university and learn more about stuff like this,” he says. “Around here, if you don’t own a dairy, if you don’t work in tourism – we’re on the coast – then you work for pretty much minimum wage.” There’s no industry, apart from a cheese factory in Tillamook, which is 40 kilometres away. “So I’ve done a really, really good job of trying to keep up with technology and get my kids interested in stuff like that. To show them it’s a big world out there, go out there and make your mark, that type of thing.”

back to the book. The book is about the future. “The revolution didn’t happen overnight the way commentators and the media predicted, so now a good amount of scepticism and cynicism has set in,” says Josh Snider, public relations manager at Makerbot. “There’s still a widespread understanding that the technology will mature and have its place in a number of industries, but the general public still only sees 3D printing as a curiosity and a ‘revolution pending’ status.”

But you know who’s not sceptical? Kids. The kids who learn the nine projects in the Makerbot Educators Guidebook will grow up thinking – grow up knowing – that printing works in a lot of ways and for a lot of things. And that it is their technology.

In October, Makerbot announced the creation of Makerbot Labs, an initiative that includes new software, hardware and community building designed to let creators create with fewer technological barriers. The centrepiece is the Experimental Extruder. An extruder is the device on a printer that absorbs whatever material is being used to print – usually plastic filament – then heats it so that it can be extruded on to the printer’s work surface (called the build plate), and casts it in solid form again. More advanced printers have experimented with other materials besides plastic – wood, metal, stone – but those materials tend to clog and wear out normal extruders. The new one from Makerbot promises to handle a variety of exotic and composite materials – cork, wood, copper, brass – printable within a temperature range of 100 and 255 degrees. “We know printing in non-typical materials – anything that isn’t PLA or ABS plastics – is much harder to do and requires some trial and error, something our competitors are happy to leave out when they list their ‘material compatibility’, ” says Snider. “We’re going to leverage our community to collaborate and hone different material profiles.”

The thing about 3D printing is, you’re going to mess up. Maybe mess up is the wrong phrase. Your efforts will not always succeed. Things won’t work. An object will collapse, or not fit together, or break when you try to remove the supports that hold it together as it comes into being. This will be frustrating, especially if you’re a seventh-grade teacher with a room full of kids staring at you. But that’s what happens. 3D printing is not really printing at all. It’s manufacturing. It’s making. And that’s a messy business. Today’s most-used printers make it easy without making it simple. They help get you to a place where you can fail, and that’s what makes us create.

Messy is where we are now. The revolution is messy everywhere. It is messy at Spacex and it is messy at GE. And it is messy at schools where kids are learning to use a new generation printer to make keepsakes and gimbal mounts and small water-carrying robots so that – in another 10 years – they can work at Spacex, GE and companies that don’t even exist yet, using materials that no one has imagined, to make breakthroughs nobody has dreamed of. – Additional reporting by Eleanor Hildebrandt