Defense Distributed Is The Greatest

[gaelic cowboy]

Fundamentally there is a difference between cutting out and printing. On the one hand you have a solid which you know "works" and can be cut repeatedly to trim it down to the required size,on the other you have to hope the right bits (i.e. doped versus normal) land up at the right place (a few nm difference) and then the bits you "spray" have to be of less than the required size because you can only add more of them. You have to be able to aim with nm precision here.

of course but seeing as were already very close to being able to print circuit boards it's likely that something like a very simple processor will be printed in the next 10yrs. Very soon no doubt people will print the board on which the processor sits and buy summit off the web to sit in it.

Once your doing that the drive to complete the circle will be immense.

Cutting is considerably easier to do, no need for moving parts with nm precision.

But cutting is wasteful and it has limitations on geometry that are not as prevalent in additive manufacture.

Yes but then you need to produce the thing in one go, i.e. no prefabbed parts and assembly. So either you need to be able to 3d-print as big as your parts need to be (in the case of aerospace, very big) or you need to weld.

one could imagine a scenario where a frame is extruded from a printer that inches along a track inside a large warehouse.


also welding does not appear to be a problem