At Home Manufacturing
It used to be that whenever you wanted to start a project of your own, you would have to outsource the pieces you couldn’t make out of some plywood or random household items. But with time and technology this has changed. As technology developed, parts and tools that would cost tens of thousands of dollars can now be bought for a few thousand or even hundreds of dollars. Some examples of these tools and machines are routers, CNC’s etc. Still there are some things even these machines can manufacture. This is where additive manufacturing comes in. More commonly known as 3D printing, additive manufacturing has many different ways of manufacturing the desired object. Some of these printers use metal powder, some resin, and most commonly plastics. These machines can create geometries that no other machine can create in any factory. The way these machines work is that they manufacture the object one layer at a time allowing it to achieve almost any shape imaginable.
Types of 3D Printers
There are four main types of 3D printers which consist of FDM, SLA, and SLS 3D printers; they all have their pros and cons and have their own gimmicks for manufacturing. For example if you want a very detailed object you might opt out for a SLA printer or if you want to print sturdy objects out of metal you would use an SLA printer, which is actually very expensive at the moment, or if you want to make prototypes or print out small object you would go for a FDM printer. Out of these three mainly used types of 3D printing, FDM, fused deposition manufacturing, is the most commonly used around the world. The way these 3D printers work is that they use plastic material that comes in strands, pull the plastic inside its “extruder”, melt it up to 200C there and lay it down in layers on a heated plate. With its simplicity, these machines can be produced very cheaply and have it reach consumers at a very low price point. FDM type 3d printers can sell for as little as 200 dollars and as much as 10,000 dollars allowing it to be bought at almost any price range.
Future of 3D Printing
3D printing technology is advancing very rapidly and it is getting cheaper by the day. This will allow the technology to take place in every household. In the future it is expected that we will start 3D printing our food rather than baking it or cooking. Even today there are some people trying to make chocolate structures with their 3d printers. But it will not only be printing our food but also our homes. Even today there are some companies who have developed or are developing machines that print out houses out of cement. It is also said that we will be able to print spacecraft in space and use those spacecraft to travel to other planets. The future for this technology is bright and we can expect that this technology will be in every home in the very near future.
