The question I asked last time was whether there was a marketplace for 3D printers in the home. Right now if there is such a market I would that it is quite small. There may be small groups of hobbyists or SME (small to medium sized enterprises) who might find such a device useful but this would not of itself constitute a sizeable marketplace. If this is the case, could it ever be the case that many homes might have a 3D printing device as part of their inventory of home machinery, sitting in some corner beside their washing machine or in the shed next to the lawnmower. Not right now, no. In fact as I see it a lot would have to change for this ever to happen.
Owning and operating a 3D printer is quite expensive right now, companies that use can afford to do so because they lower the costs of building test models of their products. They do so in two ways; the task of creating even a simple prototype can take several days of labour using a team of several trained technicians, with the aid of a printer this task is streamlined. Also, due to the fact that a printer can be kept in operation twenty four hours a day means it’s potential output trumps that of a human being. Another point to consider stems from the success of contemporary industry’s success at both defining and meeting the demands of the consumer for devices designed to make life that much easier. Would the owning of a 3D printing system in the home be compatible with industry’s need for passive consumers? Right now that is not such an issue, since few people would have the wherewithal to even attempt to build from scratch any of the machinery on which the modern home depends. DIY seems to be the upper limit of what people can achieve, with some perhaps at best capable of repairing some of the machinery in their home. The point here is that there is no incentive to try to self fabricate devices and machinery the home depends on; it will always be cheaper, easier and more prudent to buy goods that exceed a certain complexity.
Supplying goods and services to the hobbyist tends to be seen as something of a niche market. Take hobbyists who restore classic cars or build kit cars for weekend racing. They may need on occasion to have special pieces built for their project. The car restorer may someone to supply a missing component, the kit car enthusiast might need a gasket. In most cases these are supplied through specialist vendors, but if the circumstances warrant it they may be able to get the piece made. We are still in the conventional model of consumer demand in the market place. We are entering a time now where the availability of these new fangled 3D printers where a customer can design the piece he needs on his home computer and have some third party fabricate the piece for him.
As the demand for these technologies improves, it is a truism of economics that the prices will fall. Someone skilled enough and working on a project where this technology will substantially improve his or her ability to create goods may find the investment worthwhile. It is very likely that hobbyist groups will turn to this technology as and when it becomes an economically viable alternative. For this technology to bridge the gap from relatively small niche markets to becoming widespread enough to become something typically found in the home several concurrent things need to happen. The cost needs to be reduced significantly, the level of expertise required to use this technology effectively needs to be within the grasp of a large subsection of the population and complementary goods and services that allow the home user to make the most of this new technology needs to become available.
Right now some of these things are happening, albeit on a small scale. The open source RepRap community in many ways are the exemplar of this movement. As an open source project, hobbyists and semi-professionals have designed a functioning 3D printer. If you want to get your hands on one right now, you can buy either kits or fully assembled printers (if you’re interested the latest model is the Mendel. I could write several articles on RepRap and other similar open source projects, and someday I might just do that but for now I just want to point out some key features.
One of the primary goals of the reprap community is to one day build a device that can fabricate al of the parts necessary to build another printer. Right now I think it is fair to say there is along way to go before this can be achieved. Even the latest model; the Mendel, is not yet equal to professional equipment and most variants are limited with the kinds of material they can use to build objects. As yet, only various kinds of plastics and acrylics are possible and while there are members of the community working on variants that can use a technique called selective laser sintering +link to wiki to enable these machines to create metal objects, this is not yet standard. So far these printers can only produce some of the parts necessary. Most of the key components; stepper motors, metal guide rails, electronics etc, need to be purchased in order to actually build the printer. It will be a long time before these devices evolve through successive iterations before a device capable of reproducing all of the complex parts necessary for another machine is possible.
To make these devices practical for the home, several advances to the hardware are necessary. The range of objects they can produce must be made from materials that are practical, in particular several kinds of metal would be a definite requirement. Copper, steel, aluminium are present in many devices in the home and so a device that cannot use these materials would be severely limited to what it could produce. Also, the home user could not be expected to design the devices she or he needs to build. This is where the open source community could become a very useful thing indeed. Imagine a repository of online blueprints for all of the things you need in the home. These blueprints would be optimised for production by a 3D fabricator. You download the blueprints, the printer configuration files and purchase cartridges of the raw materials you require and several hours later you could have the missing fiddly bits that broke off your dishwasher, some new delf and all the bits you need to rebuild the motor in your vacuum cleaner. Machines capable of rendering these objects alreadty exist although priced somewhat out of reach to the average person. I suspect also that the skills needed to use it properly are also beyond the reach of many. Yet with most advances required being in the realm of ensuring ease of use the technology itself is already there.
So there you have it, the question is only one of market demand, will it ever be possible for this technology to compete in the marketplace. Next I will discuss what markets there could be for this technology, examine the culture of consumerism that might mitigate against and just for laughs take a quick look at the terrifying consequences of it's abuse
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