I think 3D printing has a lot of hype around it just because the "smell" of all the news articles is sort of the same as the thing I'm used to reading in the software world. It's all positive and without qualifications. To feel confident about something one needs to know what it cannot do as well as what it can and if you're not being told the negatives then it's just a sales pitch.
It sort of is amazing and yet relies on everyone mostly knowing nothing about machining and engineering so that we imagine it can make anything we might want. You can see us poor consumer lemmings rushing off to buy home 3d printers so as to be "a part of the future" and thereby paying for the huge R&D required to make things that might truly be worth the money. Without that kind of subsidy I doubt that there would be supercomputers in Los Alamos of 1/1000th the standard they have now - because us consumers paid for the R&D on the thousands of CPUs they use.
It's not that it isn't useful already or that it's won't develop a lot but I suggest that a goodly percentage of what is said about it is bull****.and that one should be asking what the limits are. e.g it's not going to make single-crystal turbine blades I presume although it might make the moulds. Without this information people are going to make silly and expensive investments and be conned,
Last edited by t43562; 29th Jul 2015 at 11:22.
Reason: grammar and spelling