Personal Manufacturing Technologies

3d Printing and Personal Manufacturing-On your Desktop

Long before microscopic scale machines combine to create the nano assembler, personal manufacturing will become a household commodity.  Having a 3d printer on your desktop is a signal of dramatic social impacts.

By bringing the manufacturing process to your living room, instead of having things built in a factory across the world, tremendous resource and efficiency savings will be realized.

In the same way that computers started showing up in universities and corporations then slowly filtered their way into the hands of individual citizens, personal manufacturing devices are nearing the horizon line of imminent ubiquity.   That is to say, everyone will have one.

 Personal manufacturing devices that are affordable to those with reasonably expansive budgets can be found in the form of desktop prototype machines.  These machines can fabricate replacement parts or new items out of a simple resin or epoxy type compound.   Many of these machines are also able to work with ceramic powders or resin fibers to create molds that are suitable for metal parts.  

As personal manufacturing becomes more common, the ability to fabricate whatever you want to have will become a way of life that expresses both individual creativity as well as allowing people to fix things which are broken.    The ability to repair machines is becoming a lost art, but the advent of widely available blueprints in informational form will change that in ways that will surprise most people.

3d modeling and fabrication images (above) courtesy of  argusengineering

 To create a new part you will need a machine, the correct composite powders or epoxies and the blue prints.    Whether you are making a coffee mug, an automotive part or making a new invention of your own design, the power will be in your reach.    The patent system has long encumbered progress, with financial barriers and the need for legal assistance.   

As prototype machines become prevalent, people will simply build what they want.  They may take this to the next level and turn themselves into a company or they may simply post the blueprints on the web in a copyleft style.    Open source in machining is very likely to model the free information philosophies of the internet.   There are many who argue that information wants to be free.   These devices will unleash the creative geniuses of many who had great ideas but lacked the means to develop the items or bring them to the world.

photo credit: By repoeblic

Future Technologies

As far as future technologies goes, this one is right on the brink of being widely available.   The competition between corporations and teams of inventors linked together on the internet highway working to create various devices is intense. Many of the open source projects deal as much with pure fabrication as opposed to pure prototype applications.    Designs are being made with the specific intent of creating machines that can build other machines.   

Whether you own a high end manufactured model or are more of a DIY kind of person, these tools will be a standard part of the home shop and will bring the capabilities of a modern factory to each individual that wants one.

Desktop Manufacturing continued