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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dvdw© who wrote (95428)	10/11/2012 6:11:08 PM
From: Maurice Winn	5 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218228

3D printing of objects is going to be useful for many things, but it's like the race between electric cars and Otto and Diesel cycle engines. For quarter of a century I have been a paid up photovoltaics/superconductor/fuel cell/methanol/electric car/battery swap/inductive recharge fan club member. They are all swishy clever technology but the century-old Diesel and Otto engines just carry on getting better and cheaper. Until the electric power economics require a change from Otto/Diesel, the incumbents will continue. Government subsidy of "the clever" is not clever as shown with Solyndra, ethanol, and anything else they do. Similarly, local printing is "clever" but making things en masse and distributing them is getting cheaper, better, faster, leaving no room for goofing around with a printer, ordering all sorts of materials, and then trying to do it. In the good old days, I made a screw driver, with a cast aluminium head. It was quite a project. 20 years ago I had a customer running a machine shop where they would put a long rod of brass or steel in a machine, put the right tools and cutting fluids into the machine, switch on, stand clear. The German design company would drive the machine from Germany. The local company collected the hundreds of bits, cleaned them up, packed them and shipped them. The cost was near zero. Injection moulders of plastic objects produce umpty thousands of plastic things at near-zero cost. Courier vans deliver things around the whole country for about NZ$8. Within a city for about NZ$3. When Google auto-cars/vans are doing the work, the cost will be more like 50c. Distribution costs are going down. There is no chance of individuals competing with that with a 3D printer. <Think in terms of Printing Spare Parts from cad files on demand....every button, nozzle, belt, assembly, knob, screw, dial, fastener, for every item in service or out...actually see a great specialty business looming for CAD Files licensing...Parts as a business.....is more than the sum of its parts. > Bulk buying of materials is a fraction the cost of buying tiny amounts of powdered specialized materials, let alone the cost of the machine, not to mention the effort in setting it up, cleaning it, repairing it. The cost of everything continues to fall as the stupendously vast economies of scale of 6 billion people is brought to bear, powered by extra-somatic intelligence and communications. 10 Geeks can invent something useful to a billion people so the cost of the development is zero per user. When development costs are zero, pretty much anything that's inventable can be invented. Even macro objects like fusion reactors become doable when the physics is achieved [which I'm working on though some of those anti-particles and reverse spin are annoyingly non-compliant with my processes]. 10,000 fusion reactors can share the development cost which is a large proportion of the objective. When there were just a few million people in England inventing the industrial revolution, the economies of scale were relatively poor. Mqurice