I don't think anyone doubts that you can make amazing structures with 3D printers. This sectional technique is a nice extension to that. What I find annoying with the current 3D printing hype is that material properties are being completely overlooked. I can make a brake disk out of sponge cake about as easily as I could print one in plastic. Neither will work though.
There's some exciting work going on at Cambridge with 3D printing using metal powders and laser sintering, but these printers will be orders of magnitude pricier than desktop plastic printers for some time.
Perhaps a nice interim approach for the maker crowd would be to combine 3D printing with lost wax or sand casting. That way, you could still print an intricate part but then use it as a pattern to create something much stronger in metal.
Metal-based laser sintering (SLS) has been used in high-end research and industry labs for the better part of 10 years (or more!). It's just the democratization provided by outfits like ShapeWays that is making it available to the masses.
People already use the casting solution you suggest. I remember the early Autom (robot) prototype used silicone casts [1]. I'm sure there are many other examples too...
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I don't think anyone doubts that you can make amazing structures with 3D printers. This sectional technique is a nice extension to that. What I find annoying with the current 3D printing hype is that material properties are being completely overlooked. I can make a brake disk out of sponge cake about as easily as I could print one in plastic. Neither will work though.
There's some exciting work going on at Cambridge with 3D printing using metal powders and laser sintering, but these printers will be orders of magnitude pricier than desktop plastic printers for some time.
Perhaps a nice interim approach for the maker crowd would be to combine 3D printing with lost wax or sand casting. That way, you could still print an intricate part but then use it as a pattern to create something much stronger in metal.
Metal-based laser sintering (SLS) has been used in high-end research and industry labs for the better part of 10 years (or more!). It's just the democratization provided by outfits like ShapeWays that is making it available to the masses.
People already use the casting solution you suggest. I remember the early Autom (robot) prototype used silicone casts [1]. I'm sure there are many other examples too...
[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/11/22/building-robot-heads-u...