Mostly 3D Printing

3D Printing from the perspective of an entrepreneur in Japan

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MIT’s move into 3D Printing education

Recently MIT announced their new 3D Printing course

But knowledge of the fundamentals of AM, its design principles, applications, and implications is one of the greatest barriers to its wider adoption. How can you harness the potential of AM and use it to drive innovation in your organization?

They are probably right that the largest obstacle to wider adoption is currently knowledge, but I suppose that could be said about most things.

It seems this course is aimed at the person in an organization that is not professional in 3D Printing but still wants to/needs to use it as part of their larger operations. Regardless, MIT has a certain gravity in 3D Printing due to its early successful alumni and proximity to companies like Markforged, Formlabs and Desktop Metal.

Step in the right direction for the industry and from a larger perspective makes me think we are really in the very early...

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NASA living on Mars with 3D Printing

Recently NASA announced the 5 winners of its 3D Printed Habitat on Mars competition.

From a 3D printing perspective, this seemed to be successful of implanting the idea that 3D printing is going to be the dominate technology of space construction.

My favorite was the autonomous walking 3D Printer that resembles some type of fantasy monolith. I think this is much more practicable than it seems because it leverages the fact that Mars has little gravity. I also liked its resource gathering strategy of using an army of smaller robots to gather raw materials. Overall, there were a few good ideas and I think a lot of benefit would be had by combining some of the insight into a single project. Also, teams seemed to focus on odd things such as maximizing the space of strength of a structure, which don’t seem to be much of a concern on mars.

It still seems to me that few teams overcame the...

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What 3D Printing will look like in 100 Years

Recently we were asked to write a ‘100 year plan’ for a large company revolving around 3D printing and their existing business.

I have this strange relationship with these types of plans. On one hand, I know that predictions 20 years into the future are nearly impossible, while predictions 100 years into future are a larger magnitude of impossible. On the other hand, I believe that these kinds of plans are extremely practical because they force you to extract the essence of a thing and not get bogged down in the supremely mutable that seems to govern most of our day to day activities.

That being said, I focused on what I believe to be the mega impact of 3D printing on society, the shift away from a global economic model that chases cheaper labor inputs to a much more local and much more tailored economy that cares more about transaction costs and personal fulfillment/experience. I...

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Will 3D Printing Bring Jobs back?

This question seems come up from time to time and I noticed that even inside the 3D Printing industry, there seem to be people who are unsure or quite skeptical about a yes answer.

If East and West both have the same 3D printing technology, tell me how 3D printers are going to “bring back jobs”? Aside from those making the 3D printers themselves, the playing field appears about the same as it was prior to 3D printers.

The real question should be restated as, Will 3D printing create more jobs than it destroys in (developed) western countries?

The answer is of course yes but not for often cited technophile ratiocination of, “but we need HUMANZ 2 build those robots”

Chasing more productive labor

Manufacturing has been chasing cheaper labor for the last several hundred years. This is partly because it was easy to transfer machinery and know how but transferring people away from their...

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3D Printing in Defense Sector

I have been thinking a lot about 3D printing in the defense sector lately as it seems that there is a confluence between defense administrators, defense suppliers, and new 3D printing hardware. While high performance 3D printed parts may capture the most attention and spending, it is probably logistics that will eventually be most impacted by the coming of 3D printing.

Deloitte’s standard pitch paper quotes Vice Admiral Philip Cullom

When advanced manufacturing and 3D printing become widely available, we envision a global network of advanced fabrication shops supported by sailors with the skill sets and training to identify problems and build and make products,

It also seems clear that the nature of war in changing or as already changed and the implications of which have not been totally explored with respect to 3D printing. For example,

rambo.jpg

RAMBO is pretty self explanatory but the...

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Moving content from WP to Svbtle

I’m moving to the svbtle platform from wordpress. Mostly due to changing hosts. I also didn’t want to bother with upkeep. I thought about posting on Medium since it seems they always have amazing SEO and niche content from experts is their MO, but it seems they removed custom domains and are moving towards some type of community driven content platform.

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