They’re getting better:
The new device reflects a wave of rapid progress in metal 3-D printing, suggesting that the technology is moving toward becoming a more realistic manufacturing tool. Last month, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had developed a new method that created stainless-steel parts three times as strong as any previous 3-D-printed steel parts. That means mission-critical parts can be created using 3-D printing without worries about compromising structural integrity. Startup Desktop Metal, meanwhile, is helping to overcome the speed barrier. Its production machine, available for purchase next year, makes metal parts 100 times faster than a laser-based 3-D printer.
Cool.
I agree, that IS cool.
This kind of technology seems key to ISRU, but I have no idea how hard it would be to turn regolith into useable feedstock for one of these things. How pure/fine/homogenous does the metal dust need to be to make good parts?
Additive manufacturing allows less skilled people to make parts. It does not yet make those parts, faster, better or cheaper. It is no way the key to ISRU. That key would be chemistry and the understanding of viable economic alternatives (an open mind.)
3D printing is great, but should not besmirch other manufacturing methods just because skills not everyone has are involved.
Rocket Lab are making their engines using additive manufacturing because it enables them to make those engines faster, better and cheaper.
Also Ursa Major’s Hadleys
Better yet will be the combination of 3d printing with subtractive tech that already makes high precision components. While a purely 3d device could leave rough surfaces making use either less efficient or impossible, at CNC Machine could do suface finishing *only* on the needed high precision surfaces, in *very* little time, compared to doing an entire piece through CNC work alone.
Strange. Other comments I’ve read here and elsewhere in the past have touted this tech as key to ISRU; i.e., turning dirt into spaceship parts, so you don’t have to take heavy bulky spare parts and tools with you.
Turning dirt into parts does not require 3D printing.
What about better, faster and cheaper?
Handmade (by someone with skill) is the definition of better. Subtractive processes generally produce better tempered results.
3D is getting faster, but it is much slower than most batch operations which can be done in parallel vs. bottleneck. The only way past the bottleneck is multiple machines (a generally bad solution.)
It is only cheaper in some low volume cases because otherwise skilled labor is required. It isn’t even close in high volume situations.
3D is part of the mix, but thinking it’s required just demonstrates how badly people misunderstand manufacturing processes. The real advantage of 3D is it increases the useful labor pool. It may have some benefit in quality control but that’s very minor to other quality control issues.
This comment only makes sense to me as a snapshot of where 3-D printing is today. You can’t compare a mature with a fledgling technology and expect your judgments to be stable. Remember when computers couldn’t play chess very well?
That’s a good comment MikeR, but we don’t know what other changes the future might bring either. Already today, traditional does some things 3D can’t and 3D does things that traditional can’t. A blend is the best option as someone already mentioned.
My problem is with two aspects. 1) the hype of 3D which will continue to have it’s inherent limitations even with improvements in the future. 2) the ignorance regarding the capability of traditional methods.
The big plus of 3D is not capability. The plus is it allows unskilled labor to do some of the things that skilled labor still does better.
Any future improvement to 3D will also advance what skilled labor can do. So until AI replaces humans the hype will never be justified.
Another big plus of 3D printing is the ability to create one of something that nobody makes anymore or never made.