What you need to know about 3D printers for today and tomorrow

Consumer technologies seem to have invaded business a lot in the last few years: mobile devices, cloud services, social networking, and so on. You can soon add another one to the mix: 3D printing. But 3D printing is not just a consumer technology — it’s also an industrial technology. What’s really happening is that the ability to create objects via printers is getting to consumer-level prices, meaning it will be affordable for individuals and businesses alike to use more broadly.

Because the technology is coming from two very different markets, you can expect to see real differences in 3D printers — and ways you might use them.

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3D printing today The consumer version of 3D printing is, at least today, meant for hobbyists. The broadest current use case is to create figurines and other tchotchkes. Think of them as custom version of those plastic GI Joe game pieces you played with as a kid, replicating you, your dog, your kid, your spouse, Mr. Spock, Angelina Jolie, or some other person. There are services that will scan you, then print out a figurine based on that scan.

3D printing works by depositing layers of a material — usually a form of plastic — to build up a shape. In mass production, you’d use a mold and pour the material into it, let it cool, and sand off the rough edges. With 3D printing, that layer buildup accomplishes the same result as the mold. It’s much, much slower, but it’s fully customized.

People in the Maker movement are prime candidates for 3D printing as well: Instead of carving a block of material into a shape, you can print it instead.

But this form of 3D printing has two major limitations today. One is that the resulting objects have little tensile strength and little temperature tolerance. They’re fine for figurines and other objets d’art, but they’re not able to handle the stress of holding up a load or of other pressures, nor do they maintain their shape in heat or stay intact in extreme cold.

If you’ve ever had a deck made of synthetic lumber, you know you have a real wood frame and real wood posts under the synthetic surface because the fibers in real wood can bear more weight (that’s called tensile strength) than the amalgam in the synthetic boards. The materials used in 3D printers also lack such fibers that provide strength to objects. Even if they had such fibers, because each deposited layer is so thin, there’s no fiber run long enough to provide tensile strength; that’s why paper towels, which have been mashed up and had their wood fibers broken apart, aren’t as strong as as a piece of wood. 

These issues also affect industrial 3D printing, whose history comes from two sources, both of which involving removing materials to create an object, as opposed to the 3D printing notion of adding materials to create it. One is photolithography, the process used to create computer chips. In that process, a block of layered silicon is etched to expose the desired circuits. The other is numeric control (NC) routing, which is a fancy term for automated lathes and other cutters. An NC router carves out the block of aluminum that becomes the chassis for a MacBook Air, the granite countertop for a kitchen, or the wood for a desktop.

Using a 3D printer would allow a single piece of equipment to create a wider variety of items, as well as reduce the wastage from cutting and etching.

Some people foresee 3D printing enabling the printing of custom or out-of-production parts as needed; workers in oil rigs, space stations, and rural farms would enthusiastically welcome this development. But the lack of tensile strength means the parts that could actually be used in production become quite limited. You could probably print a plastic gear that would last, as long as the temperature remained moderate and the gear wasn’t being warped by other forces. But forget about a gear or fastener subject to strong forces or high temperatures, such as in an engine. Aside from temporary fixes, don’t expect to create new parts for your tractor, car, furnace, or derby.

3D printing tomorrow That’s where we are today. On the industrial side, there’s a lot of research on 3D printing — and early-stage products — using materials other than plastic, including metals, ceramic composites, and biological substances. There are even some devices on the market that can print an object using multiple materials: the Holy Grail for producing commercial-grade objects.

But the printing part is only half of the equation. You need a model of what to print before you can print it.

On the industrial side, those NC routers provide a straightforward path: the CAD/CAM drawings they use. 3D modeling is no longer science fiction, but now part of standard CAD programs and even consumer-accessible software like Adobe Photoshop, whose latest version has drivers for 3D printing. I foresee a time when you could have a 3D printer at home to which you download patterns bought over the Web, sort of like sewing patterns are bought today. It’s also easy to imagine a company like Amazon.com pioneering this for consumers — who needs quadricopter delivery if you can print it on demand at home?

But for Makers and other hobbyists, even a program like Photoshop is pushing the envelope. If your goal is to replicate something — a figurine of your cat, a gear, a special Lego piece — you need a way to capture that object. Very few people could draw it themselves. That’s where 3D scanners come in. A surprising number of handheld 3D scanners are being promoted, including one that connects to the iPad, though a substantial portion are Kickstarter promises, not actual products likely to ever see the light of day.

These scanners are essentially cameras that stitch together the images to create a surface map of the object — which brings us back to the figurine issue. Because these scanners see only the surface, they send to a 3D printer simply a set of instructions for a shape that is colored to match what you see but is internally made of all the same material, such as a figurine. These scans can’t be used to create a multiple-material object, so more functional objects will still need to be generated from 3D CAD drawings, then sent to a multiple-material printer.

3D’s future is a niche one Few notions can be guaranteed to excite techies. 3D is one of those. Remember the endless blather around 3D TVs in the early 2010s? In the real world, 3D television has gone nowhere. Some believe 3D printing is destined for the same fate. I don’t agree with them; the requirement to wear 3D glasses is a big factor in the failure of 3D TV, whereas there’s no such awkward requirement for 3D printing. But I do believe that 3D printing is inherently a niche, both for consumers and businesses.

Assuming affordability, 3D printing of figurines, simple objects, and the like makes sense for people who do crafts or DIY projects (the Maker crowd). Like any hobbyist, they’ll invest in tools that let them pursue their hobbies.

For businesses, 3D printing certainly makes sense for product development, such as to visualize prototypes. That’s nothing new — for decades, companies have created models of cars, computers, and so on using traditional methods like physical model-making and carving, then NC-based automated carving, and now onscreen 3D renders. 3D printers will simplify that effort for physical objects, allowing a wider range of businesses and people within businesses do such prototyping.

If multiple-material printers become affordable enough, we’ll see custom parts generation arrive as a business opportunity at your local Home Depot, as well as auto and appliance repair shops. Maybe we’ll even see that putative Amazon 3D printer box in your home.

I don’t see 3D printing becoming as ubiquitous as 2D printing was in its heyday. But it doesn’t have to be.

This article, “What you need to know about 3D printers for today and tomorrow,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.