3D printing live: Guess the royal baby christening gift


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3D printing live: Guess the royal baby christening gift

 

Watch live as The Telegraph attempts to print a gift for Prince George's christening using a new household 3D printer. Can you guess what it is?

 

Welcome to the Telegraph's first live 3D print - follow us as we put one of the new domestic 3D printers to the test and attempt to fashion a present for Prince George's upcoming christening.

3D printing technology is no longer some futuristic fantasy or NASA plaything but instead can be enjoyed in the comforts of your own home thanks to a new generation of printers that you can pick up on the high street from this week.

The possibilities are seemingly endless, with design sites such as thingiverse.com hosting the blueprints for thousands of products that can be printed out in matter of minutes.

So, is this the dawn of the next industrial revolution? Join us and find out - and don't forget to tweet in your guesses as to what you think the present will be at #tele3dprint

 

Source and live video

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3D/4D printing (additive manufacturing) will probably replace even more factory workers than robots did as they begin printing mechanisms instead of just objects or parts.

Hell, it'll probably replace a lot of the robots that replaced the workers.

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Proper professional 3D printers can already make super detailed and working complete mechanical systems. Heck even this crap low detail home printers can make some simple multi part mechanical items. 

 

however it is and will for the foreseeable future be much to slow and expensive compared to regular manufacturing of parts and assembly. 

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Proper professional 3D printers can already make super detailed and working complete mechanical systems. Heck even this crap low detail home printers can make some simple multi part mechanical items. 

 

however it is and will for the foreseeable future be much to slow and expensive compared to regular manufacturing of parts and assembly. 

 

As with all technology, the more it's used, the better and cheaper it becomes.  Give it 10 years and you won't recognize 3D printing from how it is now.

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3D printing has existed for 20-30 years.

 

it has gotten better but for quality manufacturing it's still to slow and costly, that's going to mostly change in the next 10 is home made printing as we'll get machines that can actually make usefull and nice stuff and not these crappy glue gun extruders and reasonable prices. You won't see large scale manufacturing using it for complicated finished products the next 10 though. you'll start to see it being used more for complicated single parts like they are with laptop and phone chassi.

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What a horribly cynical and self-serving event. The Daily Telegraph is questionable at the best of times but exploiting royalty like this is in very poor taste. I'd expect this sort of thing from The Daily Mail but I thought the Telegraph had slightly better standards. The state of journalism in the UK really is depressing.

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What a horribly cynical and self-serving event. The Daily Telegraph is questionable at the best of times but exploiting royalty like this is in very poor taste. I'd expect this sort of thing from The Daily Mail but I thought the Telegraph had slightly better standards. The state of journalism in the UK really is depressing.

 

Could be worse, you know.  Could be as bad as American journalism. :p

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Could be worse, you know.  Could be as bad as American journalism. :p

Yeah, but the Daily Mail and The Sun certainly offer stiff competition.

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I recently heard an interesting interview with a chap who works for a company that is supplying NASA with 3D printers adapted to extrude materials in space.  The goal is for the printers to create replacement parts for the international space station.

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You're also seeing supports that breaks off. 

Yeah, I see that now. But that is not the image my filthy mind presented to me initally :pinch:

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3D printing has existed for 20-30 years.

it has gotten better but for quality manufacturing it's still to slow and costly,

>

I guess that's why China is printing LARGE bulkheads and other parts for their new front line fighters?

Medical implant companies are beginning to use them instead of machining?

SpaceX is printing parts including valves bodies, and even rocket engines (the SuperDraco abort/landing thruster for DragonRider)?

One of the big hits of the recent Maker's Faire was a liquid metal jet deposition printer that only used 400w for $10k that can print with 20u quality?

China says laser additive manufacturing saves 90% of raw material, and the end cost is a fraction of the traditional methods. Ex: the cost of a J-15 part made with traditional technology is $4 million, but using laser additive manufacturing the cost is only $210k.

Fighters today, passenger cars and jets tomorrow, everything else before you can blink.

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Fighters and medical equipment is not even close to what you're talking about earlier though.

 

as I said, 3D printing has been used for over 20 years, especially in precision and specialist manufacturing like fighters and medical equipments where the price of an individual part and the time to make it is't a factor. 

 

Also these parts are not made with extrusion and deposit type machines, that's generally for prototyping with a few rare exceptions. 

 

Parts are made with 5 axis(+) CnC milling machines, which are also 3D printers. 

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Additive 3D printed parts may be cheaper on raw materials(if you selectively forget that the materials can be re-used and that structurally the additive parts aren't as solid yet today. though they may be solid enough, though they'll probably have a shorter life before replacement on such things as a fighter) that subtractive, BUT traditional non 3D printed parts are still cheaper and more solid and use just as little materials as additive though. 

 

using a laser to structurally bind metal powder in a printing process, or pouring it liquid into a mould use the same amount of raw material. 

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A huge part of casting is making the mold, and huge numbers of those are now being printed.

As to sintered metals strength, be it laser or plasma or electron beam, it's durable enough to be approved for surgical implants and it can do something CnC or casting can't do: create microstructure metal foams. This is huge for implants because it allows bone to grow into them, and is huge for batteries & fuel cells. Printing organic structures is taking off, and microchips & other electronics is taxiing to the runway.

No matter if you use additive to build the structure itself or the mold to do the casting, this train has left the station.

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Yes, but none of that means that it will take over for major parts of mass manufacturing in the next 10years as was the claim. These are all specialist applications.

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"Can you guess what it is?"

Is it a big, fat, polyester dinosaur who's the color of an International House of Pancakes, with a paper plate over his face?

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