In this video, I will share with you my list of the most common misperceptions associated with desktop 3D printing as a means of detailing, what is unique about desktop, including a few concepts that have been changing recently. Without further ado, the list. Question: What's it good for any way? Making plastic trinkets? People walking past a 3D printer demo table at a Maker Faire or a hackerspace might see piles of adorable trinkets and come to this conclusion. A 3D printer only prints junk. Sure, there will be some 3D printer operators who never taste the fruits of this technology beyond handy plastic bottle openers, rapid prototyped engine part samples, and cute doe's statues. But if you step a little further down the 3D printing yellow brick road, you'll quickly recognize that this is a general purpose tool designed for adaptability and capable of a vast range of potential applications, not just one thing. A 3D printer is not an expensive wax casting vending machine at the dime store, where a handful of quarters results in the same smooshed face lion every single time. If a hammer is a tool that serves a single function, then a 3D printer might be described as a meta tool. One suited to a broad range of general purposes, constrained less by the geometry to produce than the available feedstock material, fabrication technology, tool head, and the size of the resolution of its build envelope. When you use one, you are passing a digital design to an automation system capable of producing a real physical object. You might say that this is the difference between using a carpentry workshop versus a solitary table saw. If someone sees a hammer and associates it only with the construction of backyard playhouses, so be it. That's not the hammers fault. 3D printing is a sticker smacked down to the side of a huge shipping container full of methods for producing objects from digital files. The objects that are produced can have any set of shapes, purposes, material properties, and cultural relevances afforded to manufactured objects in our world, produce with the specific processes and materials available. For a toy inventor, a 3D printer might be seen as the best tool for producing new toys and parts to pitch to a toy company. For an aerospace engineer, a desktop 3D printer might be the communication tool to demonstrate progress on a project. While the industrial 3D printer might be the machine shop and foundry wrapped into one, printing out parts ready to install into a plane or satellite. Marketing execs see this as promotional platforms. Filmmakers believe that they were invented to produce specific special effects props, puppets, stop motion characters, and crowdfunding giveaways to fund their next experimental short film. 3D hobbyists see these as an opportunity to participate in an online community, download and printout a personal avatar from a favorite online game, design and fabricate one of the kind gifts for loved ones, and still have time to print a new batch of sturdy gardening labels for the flowerbed. Question: Are desktop 3D printers by nature of lower quality and capability than their industrial counterparts? The use of the term desktop 3D printer has become common practice when referring to digital fabrication devices that are small enough and inexpensive enough for an individual operator to purchase one for desktop use. But while these are less costly and bulky than their industrial ancestors, the capabilities of all of these handy devices continues to expand quickly, learning from each other and for the market, better ways to design, build, and sell them. Already there are many desktop devices that can compete part for part for quality with industrial versions of the same added technology. Question: Can it make me anything I want yet or should I wait until 3D printing is ready for making anything? A 3D printer can make anything it's capable of constructing within the confines of its build envelope using the materials and constrained to the material properties it uses to produce an object. The desktop 3D printers of today, excluding a handful of their higher end industrial cousins, are limited machines compared to those that you might stumble upon in a modern factory. Remember that fancy bread maker your cousin gave you as a wedding gift? It fits on your countertop. Sure, but you wouldn't expect it to offer all the industrial features you'd find in a commercial bakery. Not to mention, missing the highly trained staff of bakers. While the field has made progress along the path to raising expectations about core features, reliability, and user experience, 3D printers are far less impressive in engineering and manufacturing feet than the laptops or desktop computers sitting right next to them. They are less productive per square inch and per minute than your smartphone. But this in no way diminishes the value of what they do or how they do it. In my opinion, their best offering is the chance to participate in the evolution of design thinking and our relationship with the physical hardware of our manufactured environments. Pressure to innovate and find new opportunities to shape this emerging market make 3D printers handy rubrics for tracking the evolution of digital fabrication in our lives and businesses. The outpouring of projects created around a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black single-board computer is a similar case in point. Lightweight Linux computers aren't new, but the availability of these minicomputers were less than the cost of a coffee table art book changes the game, offering a range of applications never before possible. At the purest level, 3D printers are affordable, convenient automation systems, running on inexpensive feedstock situated along the digital analog borderlands between the world of computer art and whack sculpture. By keeping one foot in each realm, they are portals for making ideas solid. They are idea machines. The machines aren't as impressive for the specific physical models that they can produce, as for their capacity just suspend time, thought, and space. You can render out a physical draft of your work done to date here, there, or anywhere else in the universe. It doesn't even have to be finished and primed, to be put into use immediately, whether for an enclosure, mechanical assembly, or a child's playset. 3D printing is a field that stands on the shoulders of mechanical engineering and industrial fabrication. Leaning on second cousins such as injection molding, ceramics, mold making and casting, and balancing on the entire subtractive manufacturing history of the planet. But the crucial component here is your imagination tempered into shape by digital design. Watching these machines work, we're eager to become micro manufacturers. Clicking a button to summon up whistles, camera bodies, and Batmobiles on the build platform right before our eyes. Question: Okay then. So how can I get to make what I want it to make? Okay then. So how can I get to make what I want to make? This technology requires an expert sculptor, programmer, a machinist wrapped in one. Often, this question comes out as something like: How do you get the image from your head into the machine? You develop your ideas from sketches into three-dimensional digital models and then prepare a machine instruction file for the production of your project that has been tuned to suit the constraints of your hardware, and then your creation will emerge into the physical world. 3D printers have a reputation as machines that can make anything, but I suggest asking this question instead: What can we learn about how 3D printers function and how can this information help us design better, more successfully produced work? There are more resources than ever now out there to help you get your feet wet with 3D design. Not to mention, hundreds of thousands of remarkably confident how to cosplay and replica prop videos on YouTube. They were created to help others pick up the basic skills to master a tremendous range of expressive finishing techniques. More than you're guessing, I pick up things there all the time. Question: Is 3D printing addictive? Is 3D printing addictive? Okay. This one is not a misperception; it's just the 100 percent genuine truth. So those are the highlights from my list of common 3D printing misperceptions, first of a pretty long list of ones I have observed over the past few years. Which did I miss? Share them in the discussion forums for this course.
