3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production

[white_wolf]

The more I hear about 3-D Printers the more I'm impressed with them. At first I thought they were just some gimmick, but it looks like they may really change things.


"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo.

Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. The designers were able to focus more on the optimal automobile physics, rather than working to install a hyper efficient motor in a heavy steel-body automobile. As the Urbee shows, making a car with this technology has a slew of beneficial side effects."



http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/3d-printed-car/

[NYC_SKP]

1. Kick. (nt)

[msongs]

2. can they print motor oil and gasoline too? nt

[Trajan]

4. Yes ....

Absurd questions deserve absurd answers ....

[dkf]

10. Well if they are going to be printing human kidneys who knows

Using 3D printing to build a real organic human kidney


Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.

http://genecure.blogspot.com/2012/06/using-3d-printing-to-build-real-organic.html

[BlueStreak]

3. It takes 2500 hours to make all the parts for the car?

That's abut 4 months of continuous operation. And I bet that doesn't include the drive train, seats, tires, or final assembly.

I just don't see this technology being viable for production products anytime soon. There are much cheaper, faster ways to stamp out plastic parts in volume.

If the printing time were 1000 times faster, and it may be one day, then it might make good sense during the design phase of cars, for the prototype models.

I don't ever see a boutique industry for carss because of the safety standards we require each new car model to undergo -- for good reason.

[dkf]

7. Boeing is using this.

3D Printing Coming to the Manufacturing Space—and Outer Space

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/3d-printing-coming-to-the-manufacturing-spaceand-outer-space-01092012.html

Currently the aerospace and automotive industries make up about 20 percent of the 3D printer industry’s revenue, according to the IBISWorld report. In the past, those industries mainly used the printers to make models of vehicles or aircraft. Today, companies such as Boeing (BA) are using 3D printers to generate actual parts.

“Boeing now has parts on flying military aircraft made by 3D printers without a single failure,” says Wohlers, president of Wohlers Associates, a consulting firm that focuses on rapid product development and additive manufacturing.

Boeing has conducted extensive research and development on additive manufacturing methods since 1997, according to Daryl Stephenson, a company spokesman. “Boeing has used additive manufacturing processes to produce more than 20,000 parts that are on military platforms that we have delivered to our customers,” he says.

[BlueStreak]

18. What are those parts?

My guess is they are knobs or other non-vital parts that are small and not subject to a lot of stress. That makes perfect sense. For example, I bet they can produce a toilet seat for under $5000.

To generalize this to large scale products is quite a stretch. It is OK to spend $20 to build a part that only uses $0.05 of plastic if it is an easy way to make the 50 of those you need for a billion dollar project. I don't expect anybody is going to print a complete rocket ship and fly it into space any anybody's lifetime here.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

23. Some parts can take sizable strees

An AR-15 lower receiver (the registered part of the gun) has been printed and it fired 1000s of rounds. Magazines are even easier

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172112074

[sofa king]

11. That's not all that much, really.

I don't know why the damned Nazis always provide the dark and chilling perfect example, but here it is:

The Focke-Wulf FW-190 was one of the better fighter planes of World War II, striking fear into the hearts of thousands of Allied airmen whenever just a handful of them would show up. Most German planes at the time took around 7000 hours of labor to produce, and the 190 was probably no exception.

But the FW-190 was special in another way. No single part of it was built in any one factory. Rather, its components were redundantly sub-contracted out among dozens of tiny factories from around Germany, and only brought together for final assembly. New variants were introduced constantly, around every 90 days, and older versions were sometimes upgradeable.

It was effectively impossible to stop production of the FW-190, and its production actually increased as Allied industrial bombing ramped up through 1943 and 1944, in large part because Albert Speer encouraged the de-centralization of production. The Germans had more planes than they had fuel to fly them with for the rest of the war (I notice another poster in this very thread made the same observation about this car).

This is precisely what 3D printing promises to bring. The vehicle itself doesn't have to be built in any one place; rather, its thousands of parts can be built and partially assembled by hundreds of printers separated by thousands of miles, then shipped to a final assembly plant--or even an enthusiast's garage. It might take one printer four months to make one, but it might take a thousand printers two and a half hours (allowing 6-8 weeks for delivery, of course!).

I am not convinced that this is a good thing, as in an intimately related story, some Texans are already inviting you to download the plans for the lower receiver of an AR-15.

This is exactly what you would expect a bunch of dudes to do when you give them a miracle machine that can build anything they want: they build things that kill people. The damned Nazis weren't building welcome mats with the same idea, either.

But you could make welcome mats with them. Probably really nice ones with customer-designed greetings. Maybe I'll look into that while the world burns.

[BlueStreak]

19. The example was of the plastic body for a car

Using conventional plastic manufacturing processes, you can produce those parts in a matter of minutes, not 2500 hours. And 3D printing is at least 2 orders of magnitude more expensive when you ignore setup costs. Therefore, the only way to reach a break-even is on jobs where the set-up costs dominate -- like one-off production of a unique product. A car maker might use this approach for one of their concept cars, where design control is the goal and cost is not the driving factor.

I think the 3D stuff is interesting, and will certainly improve over time. But it is vastly over-hyped right now.

[Mopar151]

26. Make a part = $$$ Make a mold for low volume composite/plastic casting = Pretty cheap

And you can pull a sprayed metal or cast plastic mold off a positive, or use wax as a medium to make models for investment casting.

There are other ways to do this stuff, too, and several of them are very highly advanced, and have been driven by computers since about a week and a half since there were computers.

I drive the older models of these for a living -
Mold work, automation, high temperature equipment. This could be running in your gararge for 60K $

[BlueStreak]

30. That makes sense to me

But correct me if I am wrong. You can use CNC lathes to do the same kind of thing -- making molds for large scale production with conventional injection, right?

I can see that there might be some mold-making jobs that are easier to do with addition rather than subtraction. And the 3D printer might be a lower cost of entry for a very small scale fab operation.

I don't deny this is progress. But I just question "how revolutionary" it will be in the big scheme of things. I just don't see somebody pushing a button and out pops a car -- even 2500 hours later.

[Mopar151]

31. Those are CNC mills - it depends on the shape of the part which is better

Lathes and mills have interbred since shortly after the modern forms were evolved in the 1830's. The smartest guy I ever hired leased 2 turn/mill machines (Mazak Integrex), parked them in his gararge,and went all in on being a high-end turn-mill shop.

[Bonobo]

5. What will we do with all the extra people though?

You can only throw so many in jail...and if they ALL live on the streets, how will the rest of us get to the few jobs left?

[BlueStreak]

20. Easy. Print more jails. Print a bunch of prison guards.

[Mopar151]

32. Look around our country

We have neglected to maintain so much that we could easily take up the slack with millions of caretaking, maintainence, and refurbishment jobs. It will take rejiggering our economy some to make it work, but I think the net effect on the economy, and the country, would be positive

[dkf]

6. Holy cow.

The more I read about 3d printing the more I wonder how we are supposed to employ people.

[Pab Sungenis]

14. Read "Makers" by Cory Doctorow.

It's fiction, granted, but I love its vision of the "New Work."

What we're looking at is the end of industrialization and the return to the age of artisans.

[white_wolf]

25. That's an interesting take on it.

If this technology does take off the way they are hyping it then traditional manufacturing will be a thing of the past. I think we could do a lot of good with this technology, but then again I'm a bit of a techno-utopian.

[jmowreader]

29. It's going to have to get a LOT faster to make traditional manufacturing a thing of the past

What is becoming a thing of the past is "job shop production lines" like automakers used to run.

Job shop manufacturing is production of custom things - printing is the best example of this. Production line manufacturing makes lots of one thing.

Cars used to all be different - there was a list of options that covered several pages, you picked out the ones you liked, they made you a car and six weeks later you had it. It is a royal pain in the ass to work that way because you have to make sure all the right parts get on the car, that the car goes to the right dealer, and so forth. Today, all cars are made basically alike except for color, and any options you might want are installed at the dealership. (I know about factory options packages but if you order a package you have to take everything on it; you can't decide you want everything but the red stripe on the door, and before you could.)

A 3d printer would be just perfect for the military. They buy four of them for each division, put them at the direct-support maintenance company, and let motor sergeants order "parts that rarely break" to be made locally. If Humvee fuel pedals don't break, it makes no sense to stock them...but if one breaks and you don't have stock, a truck has to sit while they send back to Indiana to get one. OTOH, with a 3d printer at DS Maintenance, ol' sarge could call over, get them to crank out a fuel pedal, and have the truck back in operation the next morning.

But for production line manufacturing, the idea of having to wait 400 hours to get one bumper made, especially since a bumper can be rotomolded in a few minutes, is unacceptable especially if you need 10,000 bumpers.

[Pab Sungenis]

33. The technology is in its infancy.

It will take decades, at least, for the technology to mature enough to supplant current manufacturing techniques, but it has potential.

[jmowreader]

34. It is a technology with two applications

First is prototyping. Before 3d printing, if you want to make a prototype of a molded item you had to make production tooling - so only things you knew would sell well ever got that far. Now you can print one and show it to people.

The other is making very short production runs. Jay Leno has one of these printers to make replacement parts for his cars.

For high volume production, there will always be better methods. In the article at the top of this thread, the guy talks about printing a bumper cover in 400 hours. If they came out with a printer 400x faster, you'd still get two covers per shift or six per 24-hour day. Using today's technology you can make thousands of bumper covers per shift by molding them.

I think 3d printing will be a really great tool.(I can think of a bunch of stuff I'd use one for.) But at the same time I think it is a tool...not a one-size-fits-all panacea. I wouldn't use a shovel to dig a swimming pool, I'd use a backhoe. Nor would I use a 3d printer to make 10,000 of something.

Every tool has a place.

[Pab Sungenis]

37. It's not meant for mass-production.

It's meant for individual production. Artisanal work. Or to allow individual users to build their own items at home instead of through someone else.

[jmowreader]

39. Go back through the thread

WAY too many people are all this will kill the factory, this will be the way everything will be made, yada yada. And then you look at how fast it prints...this guy could have made so many hoods his shipping clerk would need to file for overtime to get rid of them all in the time it took him to print one.

A printed car is a neat proof of concept. It's not a product.

[bhikkhu]

28. Well, there's manufacturing, and then there's the service industry

its a matter of distributing the wealth generated by production fairly, to support all the subsidiary things that make up a decent life for people.

We have had the same problem going on for over 100 years; it used to be that one farmer could only produce enough food to feed three or four people; here and everywhere else about 50% of the population was farmers. Now every farmer produces enough food for 200+ people, and lots of people had to find different things to do...its been pretty uneven, but things work out more or less.

Mostly, people like other people more than machines and more than being alone, so you can only go so far with stuff. The service industry is people relating to and serving other people, which is more "the future", one would hope. Some day we might have all the flashy cheap gizmos we want, and still have money left over to spend with other people doing things we enjoy.

[donco]

8. COOL

a cardboard car for every cardboard house.

[A HERETIC I AM]

9. Ummmmm....

To further remedy the issues caused by modern car-construction techniques, Kor used the design freedom of 3-D printing to combine a typical car’s multitude of parts into simple unibody shapes. For example, when he prints the car’s dashboard, he’ll make it with the ducts already attached without the need for joints and connecting parts. What would be dozens of pieces of plastic and metal end up being one piece of 3-D printed plastic

That's all well and good till something breaks, like a hinge pin that has been 'printed' inside a moving part and can not be disassembled in order to replace it. "God Dammit! Now the AC port only blows on my knee! And I have to buy an entire new dashboard to get it fixed!"

Not to mention crashing the car.

I see a whole hell of a lot of hoops to jump through.

[Egalitarian Thug]

12. This technology is a tectonic shift that has manufacturing moguls shitting themselves. n/t

[BlueStreak]

21. I don't believe that.

It has been around about about a decade now. It is improving, but not all that quickly. It is still extraordinarily slow and 1000 times more expensive for any high-volume large parts. It will be a very gradual shift, not a tectonic shift, IMHO. 25 years from now, these machines might be as common as CNC lathes, but will not have replaced them.

We do have to be mindful of the employment impact, but is isn't any different from any other new manufacturing technology. The steam engine did not end all employment, after all.

The natural trend if for jobs to be eliminated. That has ALWAYS been the case. We have to fight that, but that is true whether or not some factories bring in some 3D printers.

[uponit7771]

13. Once Princeton releases Chopper 3D printing will be changed forever, Print a house if you want to

....and have enough time and printing resin

[CJCRANE]

15. A similar idea (printing a house) was mentioned in a sci-fi novel published in the 50s...

"Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand" by Brian Aldiss.

[reformist2]

16. Meh, I want to make these shiny black squirrels!

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/03/3d-print-smoothing/

[BlueStreak]

22. Please note that finish is achieved by making the plastic ooze, so

it is not usable for anything requiring precision. But not everything requires precision to thousandths of an inch.

[postulater]

17. I'll wait for a Replicator

"Tea, Earl Grey. Hot."

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. 'half the weight' is wrong - 1200 lb versus a Smart Fortwo at 1600 lb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Fortwo

And that's comparing it with an actual road car, not something that has been designed to within an inch of its life to be lightweight, however impractical that makes it (no-one will want to drive a car about 3 and a half feet tall in traffic. You won't be able to see a thing, and you'll feel like you're about to be crushed. There's a reason that the Sinclair C-5 was a complete flop, and recumbent bikes are unpopular).

[1-Old-Man]

27. So, by copying someone else's work no one will have to work anymore and everything will be free.

[Bosonic]

35. First fully articulated 3D printed dress

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4077638/dita-von-teese-3d-printed-articulating-dress-shapeways-swarovski

[daleo]

36. Just print money with it

If they are that good, just print some money and buy whatever you like.

[IDemo]

38. Desktop printing hasn't killed off the offset printing industry

Inkjet and laserjet printers are valuable because they offer the user instant results and networkablility. But the cost of supplies makes either unsuitable for production quantities when compared to the offset printshop. The same will likely be true of 3D printing for quite some time to come. While it will be very useful for prototyping and small production runs, in no way will it be competitive with existing automated production technology for large lots.