http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2107776
BY DEBRA THIMMESCH · DECEMBER 11, 2014
In my day job I work in the commercial printing equipment business. I think most people have underestimated the cost and overestimated the usefulness of 3D printing. It really hasn’t taken off yet like many expected. The real niche is for prototyping in manufacturing not finished product. Also, while the equipment is really cool it requires a highly skilled user to get results. Our primary manufacturer has a stake in a company called MakerBot and is marketing it overseas and I’m sure will be adding it to our portfolio here in North America soon so someday I’m sure we’ll get involved.
anything but. More and more products are coming to market that are 3D printed.
Issues remains cost of larger printers, and advancing technology to utilize more comprehensive materials.
Cost wil come down as demand grows, and intensive R and D is currently being focused on advancing a broad range of metal and polymer materials, essential to next generation platforms.
Manufacturing process shifts tend to be more incremental then seismic. Most companies will ride the current investment in hard production infrastructure as long as they possibly can, until they are just no longer competative with emergent technologies.
The post WW2 Japanese steel industry is analagous. We bombed the crap out of their steel foundries during the war, and then after the war America decided it was best to get Japans steel industries up and running again to provide some economic stability, and invested in the first generation of closed hearth steel furnaces. Soon, Japan was eating Americas lunch, which was still using the much less efficient open hearth process, with the quality and lesser cost of their steel products, while American steel manufacturers drug their feet until they became obsolete. Detroit and Pittsburg were just a couple of the American cities that slid into severe local recessions due to the loss of former keystone steel manufacturing industries that didn’t adapt in time.
“If we don’t understand our history, we are doomed to repeat it”