In his article, “Exploring the 3-D printing opportunity” J.Bird touched on several interesting facts about 3-D printing of which I was not aware, including the fact that 3-D printing has been around since the 1980’s. 3-D printing is not a “new” technology, but rather one that is being explored and exploited more now because of patents that have since expired. There are several ways of printing objects in three dimensions including fusing powdered material such as titanium with a laser, dispensing melted plastic through a nozzle, and photo curing plastic resin. 3-D printing is much more environmentally friendly than traditional manufacturing techniques, because traditional cutting and grinding produces more waste. 3-D printing has exciting applications in the medical field: last year surgeons created a replacement jaw for an 83-year old woman in titanium that took 33 layers to form each 1mm of thickness. 3-D printing makes creating one-off objects much more economically viable since there is no need to create specialized tooling, no need to create molds, and it eliminates hours of machining to take the cast item from the mold stage to the finished product. Since there is no need for specialized tooling, product development times can be reduced from months to just weeks. Products can be developed and designed one day and printed overnight for use the next day.

The future seems to be limitless for this technology. 3-D printed clothing could be customized to the individual’s physiology, truly customized shoes could be produced at mass market prices in a fraction of the time needed in the past for a similar custom shoe, and sports equipment could be customized for each athlete maximizing their performance. We could truly live in a world where we could have most everything customized to our needs and tastes without the huge expense typically incurred today.

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