Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday October 15, 2013 @04:50PM
from the do-we-have-star-trek-replicators-yet dept.

dryriver sends this BBC report:
"The European Space Agency has unveiled plans to 'take 3D printing into the metal age' by building parts for jets, spacecraft and fusion projects. The Amaze project brings together 28 institutions to develop new metal components which are lighter, stronger and cheaper than conventional parts. Additive manufacturing (or '3D printing') has already revolutionized the design of plastic products. Printing metal parts for rockets and planes would cut waste and save money. The layered method of assembly also allows intricate designs — geometries which are impossible to achieve with conventional metal casting. Parts for cars and satellites can be optimized to be lighter and — simultaneously — incredibly robust. Tungsten alloy components that can withstand temperatures of 3,000C were unveiled at Amaze's launch on Tuesday at London Science Museum. At such extreme temperatures they can survive inside nuclear fusion reactors and on the nozzles of rockets. 'We want to build the best quality metal products ever made. Objects you can't possibly manufacture any other way,' said David Jarvis, ESA's head of new materials and energy research."

And yet everyday we are using alloys, materials, and medicines that 40 years ago were all but a dream.

Hybrid synthetic fibers, hell the metal alloy's used in your cell phone, and laptop didn't have mass production status 40 years ago. 40 years ago building things at sub 100nm processing was considered all but impossible.

The real trick isn't when it is first possible to do something or even when it is available to a select few, but when any idiot can do it. The microwave oven took 15 years to go from proof of concept to an affordable counter appliance. and another 10 years for decent ideas on how to use it practically.

Metal 3D printing is a good 20+ years from everyday use. but it starts today.

Or someone recognizing that coffee is the vehicle of a drug delivery system and that that someone needs some WD-40 for the brain NOW, not in however long it takes to make a new cuppa.

When I creak and groan and hobble out of bed if there's a half-mug of coffee from last night I don't even bother nuking it. THEN I can proceed to combine nicely-roasted beans and filtered water into something more palatable. If there's no coffee when I awake do not approach unless maybe the house is burning - and even then I

I heard the same nonsense about manufacturing in space 40 years ago. Impossible alloys! Precious pure medicines! Yeah, right. Grow up you loons, you're being had.

40 years ago cell phones were sci-fi fantasies. Flat screens were sci-fi fantasies. Recording TV shows in your living room was a fantasy. Playing a record album (not a cassette) in you car was my schizophrenic friend's fantasy (I told him he was nuts. He was, but we have CDs in cars now). There were no treatments for schizophrenia, now many schizop

... but I don't know when numerical control was first done for it? My father worked on a system to put metal on the bottom of ceramic cookware to improve heat conductivity at METCO in the 1980s, although even then that was done by hand for tests. Flame spray was commonly used then to build up worn metal shafts for repairs. From:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_spraying [wikipedia.org] "In classical (developed between 1910 and 1920) but still widely used processes such as flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the particl

Holy... wow. This and a handful of other posts were eye-openers for me. Thanks, all. Sheesh, I gotta get out more. I mean, I can sort of forgive my ignorance because of not having need for exposure in this area, but to be that ignorant of it...

My limit was wood working. People who do stuff in metals have always amazed me. Even straight-forward mill work is neat; then add in 'tuned' forging, heat treating, all that, it's half-magic to me, let alone the ways to forecast and arrive at particular crystall

Yeah, it is amazing what is possible technologically compared to politically/socially. I wrote a related essay here:"Getting to 100 social-technical points"https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/BByqMARHqOw [google.com] "One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.:-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.So, 50 * 2 = 100.Or, 2 * 50 = 100.or, 10 * 10 = 100.

First of all is the really important question, "Does this guy ever sleep?" The answer, of course, is yes. He's cloned himself several times and has learned how to do effective, conflict-free, brain copying.

I like the soc-tech points, never seen it laid out like that, and it makes easy sense and calc, once one arrives at how to go about assigning those points to begin with. Actually, back of the envelope WAG calculation is neat, it allows for slop and helps show the shapes of things (which is not a shabby

Um....people have already been doing this for some time now [wikipedia.org]. News that would be interesting to me would be to make 3d metal printing semi-affordable for the common hacker since most of these machines cost around $1,000,000. Right now 3d printing molds for metal casting is the only practical solution.

Yeah, I could have sworn I remember reading about 3D printed aluminum parts in aircraft already. Like, a few years ago. That's great they want to advance it, but "taking it into the metal age"? Please.

We have/had a Cold Spray machine here at work. Not a lot of business for it, so it's not active right now. You could just mix in various titaniums, steels, aluminum and make all types of fun semi-alloys. You could even mix plastic or other materials in there to get some really interesting and crazy materials, but none of them really exhibited true alloy-like characteristics. The most practical thing I saw it do was a local machine shop botched the job on the final pass of this hugely expensive large precision titanium piece that would require them to junk it and start over. We cold-sprayed the gouge back in and then they re-machined it correctly, saving tons of time, money and effort.

Problem is that alloys or unique materials nearly always get their unique properties due to the unique circumstances with which they were formed. There's always interesting steps to ensure that the bonds are as expected, like extreme pressure or heat, being under various gas blankets or fluids when combining, etc.

This is just melty where Cold Spray was deformative.

I mean this is cool. You can make some really neat things, but exotic alloys or new materials is definitely not one of them.Yea, you could stack materials or "thread" them together, but we're already pretty good at that using massive presses.

From the wikipedia article: "Gas dynamic cold spray (GDCS) is a coating deposition method developed in the mid-1980s in the Soviet Union."
Nice. I've never heard of this technology. For a while I was working for a small startup doing some mechanical design and was doing research into exotic fabrication technologies. I came across some truly great technologies -- hydroforming, which uses hydrolic pressure to form metal into deep draw forms and Explosive Forming which, yes, involves using explosive to shape

http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap [reprap.org]
They're using an triode electron gun to melt the powder. Trouble is that most of the items needed aren't in wide use. They have made great progress though.

Yes. For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market for a couple hundred.

For the low investment cost of, say, $250,000, you can own a machine that laser-sinters metal into something that will allow you to make most parts of a gun with the possible exception of the springs. Or, you could ya know, buy a gun on the black market

Today, $250,000. Ten years down the road, $2,500 and then you can churn out each gun for a marginal cost of $10 with absolutely no worries that the guy who sold you the materials is actually an undercover cop working an illegal weapons sting.

If the price of lasers capable of rapidly smelting highly durable metals drops to 1/100th of their price in 10 years, I'm going to become a lot less worried about the people worried about shitty printed guns, and a lot more worried about asshats with lasers capable of rapidly smelting highly durable metals

You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.

Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.

And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.

Hell it's legal to do it without the proper licenses -- minus NFA weapons -- as long as you don't do it for the purpose of reselling. If you do sell a weapon or two -- as long as you're not doing it as a means of living -- all you need to do is slap a serial # on there.

Have you ever tried to hand-fit a 1911 from individual parts, and blend the contours of the grip safety, mainspring housing and the frame into each other using only a dremel tool? Man, 3D printing will make it gloriously easy!

Especially in bearings porous can be a feature, not a bug. In ball bearings I'd guess it's always a bug though. Slide bearings are customary made sintered, since you can push oil through the bearing bush itself to lubricate the works. One of the disadvantages is that you can't widen them with a simple lathe because that closes the pores.

Parts destined for aerospace are subject to rigorous testing and the first dozen or more prototype parts usually are sacrificed for testing. Exact dimensions, strength, creep and fatigue resistance must all be determined and the statistical lower bounds must be established before any part can be certified as airworthy. For wrought alloys this stuff is old hat. Things like welding are more of a problem and fabricated parts have fallen out of favor due to the rigorous QA needed. Look also at the use of as-HIP

Whenever they talk about strength they talk about using strong materials like tungsten. But most strong parts in the real world are made by forging weak (and cheap) materials like iron, to fix the crystal structure for the desired properties. I don't see how 3D printing will address this. If strength is only available via strong materials then applications will be severely limited.

Hmm... isn't this already being employed by SpaceX? Just look at the 3D design video and at the 3 minute mark Elon describes how they send the design straight to laser-metal printer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY [youtube.com]