The 3D Printing Revolution

Less than a decade ago, 3D printing at home was virtually unheard of. The entire industry was controlled/dominated almost solely by Statasys, an Israel-based company that continues to make high-end (and very expensive) 3D printers. Fortunately, barriers to market entry were rather low, and companies like MakerBot, Deltaprintr, and dozens of others sprang up from designs based on the open-source RepRap project (a RepRap is a DIY 3D printer that can print many of the parts that can themselves be used to construct another RepRap). [http://reprap.org/] Due to such initiatives and subsequent start-up companies founded by hobbyists, the price of a base model plummeted from tens of thousands of dollars per unit to just a few hundred in a short few years. [http://deltaprintr.com/]

The implications of a such a drop in price are phenomenal; the growing adoption of the technology by consumers is very quickly spurring new innovation that we could only have dreamed of 5-10 years ago. From plastic nuts and bolts, and cases for your phone, to home-printed firearm parts, and anything else you might find on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com) – almost any object that you can envision can be printed by simply melting plastic into a particular shape (the technological premise behind many, but not all, of today's 3D printers). To add to the novelty of it all, the designs mentioned here (and millions more) can easily be downloaded from the Web, fed into a program like ReplicatorG [http://replicat.org/], and then sent to a 3D printer to be physically created. Think about that for a second – one can now, more or less, download physical objects from the Internet!

Beyond just reproducing the designs of others, people with access to 3D printers can create and build their own objects/prototypes in a matter of hours – a process that used to require several weeks or even months of dealing with various vendors. As a result, people and companies can now, in effect, create and innovate at a far faster and cheaper rate than they ever could have previously imagined.

All of the positive outcomes listed, however, do not come without their inherent negatives. As I briefly mentioned above, the idea that almost anyone can now print fully plastic firearm parts or even entire firearms from the comfort of their own home instills an understandable fear in some (the truth is that firearms were already quite easy to make at home before the home 3D printing revolution, but that's a story for another post). Furthermore, the frustrating question of intellectual property rears its ugly head once again – should a mere design for an object be able to be patented?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am one of the few of those directly responsible for hacking the Stratasys SST-class 3D printer to allow inexpensive refills of ABS plastic cartridges with third-party material. [http://www.gnurds.com] Judging by the amount of attention my work has received through the comments, personal emails, and various forks/discussions of it in the few years since I have published it on my blog, it is without a doubt that 3D printing is a rapidly rising industry.