3D printers will change the future of manufacturing

How do we prepare for this manufacturing revolution in the making?

You can now print your own gun. And there are plenty of ways to do so, legal and otherwise. A group called Defense Distributed offered you a new one last week: It published instructions for creating a plastic firearm using a 3-D printer. One guy even fired a real bullet with it.

 

 

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Urbee II – 3D printed car drives toward mass production

Urbee

While major car manufacturers are exploring 3D printing for prototyping car parts, it’s inevitable that a road-worthy 3D printed car is not too far into the future.  Thanks to KOR EcoLogic the future of 3D printed cars could arrive soon. KorEcoLogic has teamed with Stratasys’s RedEye On Demand 3D printing business unit to fabricate a lightweight electric car that could take to the streets in about two years.

 

 

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The 3D printed gun movement – meet the American ‘crypto-anarchist’ who wants everyone to print their own guns

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DconsfGsXyA[/youtube]

3D printers allow people to print guns, but just because we have the ability to do so doesn’t mean that we have to.  But, of course, there will be someone who is going to do it. And that somebody isn’t just going to print their own guns, but they’re going to make it their cause, and devote their time and energy to making sure other people can too. That person, in America today, is 25-year-old Cody R. Wilson.

 

 

 

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Fabsie – a library for printed furniture

Fabsie stool

Thanks to 3-D printers one day custom furniture can be turned into something for the masses, but for now, James McBennett is more concerned with an older, perhaps less sexy, machine, that essentially does to wood what 3-D printing does to concrete or plastic. It’s called a computer numerical control (CNC) router, and “It’s 60 years old,” McBennett says.

 

 

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World’s first 3D printed canal house in Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s canal house will be the first 3D printed house in the world.

The Dutch studio DUS Architects is planning on developing the first 3D-printed house which is meant to become a full-size canal house in Amsterdam, alongside the Buiksloter-canal. The process will be made possible by employing a special printer called the KamerMaker. “This year we want to print the entire facade and the first room bit by bit. Then in the following months and years we will print other rooms.”-architect Hedwig Heinsman explained. (Pics)

 

 

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Makexyz links 3D printer owners to designers

MakerBot Replicator 2X 3D desktop printer.

It may only be in its infancy, but a new startup has already found a way to disrupt the 3D printing industry. Makexyz  is a 3D printing service with a brilliantly simple premise: Link the 3D printer owners of the world with the designers that need them. It’s like Airbnb or Wheelz, but for 3D printers.

 

 

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Urbee – World’s first 3D printed car ready for production

The Urbee – a 3D printed car.

This is 2013, and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that someone was using 3D printers to make a car.  In this case, the car is the Urbee, a tiny three=wheeled economy car with an electric motor, internal combustion engine, and a 3D printed frame.

 

 

 

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The future of 3D printing and the retail business

Recently, Marc Andreessen made some bold statements about the future of the retail business:

“Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative,” he says. “You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model.”

 

 

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World’s first 3D building will be ready in 2014

3D printed house

3D printing can be fun and cute. Products like the Makerbot and Form 1 will most certainly disrupt manufacturing, even if it’s only on a small scale. But the possibilities of 3D printing stretch far beyond DIY at-home projects. In fact, it could entirely replace the construction industry. (Pics)

 

 

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2012 was a year of expansion for 3D printing

As 3D printing expands its influence into mainstream culture, plenty of amazing things are happening. There are a lot of 3D printing companies expanding and getting more funding, but enterprising designers are finding more and more ways to use the fledgling printing technology. While some of these uses are a bit troubling (like piracy of copyrighted material and firearms), others show that, with enough ingenuity, 3D printing can change lives. Let’s take a look at some of the industry’s bigger stories from this year.

 

 

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World’s first “printable house” right around the corner

Eventually, everything will become a canvas.

Someone will make the world’s first ”printable house” within the next year. ”It might not be a very good house but it will go down in history,” says American futurist Thomas Frey, author of the prediction and a speaker at the Creative Innovation conference in Melbourne next week. ”Eventually, we’ll be ‘printing’ 30-storey buildings – and huge replicas of, say, the Statue of Liberty to put on top.”

 

 

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