Design for 3D-Printing

I always thought 3D printing would make multi widget machine[0] manufacturing possible

While it’s done a lot of cool stuff and enabled rapid prototyping etc it never scaled the way I really thought it would

[0]: there may be a better turn for this however this is what I mean: that is one machine that can output a wide variety of different things using the same common material, IE maybe one day it produces ball bearings and the next it could produce a bunch of car pistons, with only having to make minimal changes to the machine itself if not changing anything at all

"Flexible" or "Quick Turn" manufacturing are terms used for this kind of thing. Quick-turn comes from being able to change from one kind of part to another, quickly, with no added setup cost.

In theory, it seemed perfect for flexible manufacturing: same machine, same material, endless outputs. But in practice, it hit limits in speed, material properties, and post-processing. You still can’t print a high-tolerance metal part at scale and cost-effectively replace traditional machining. It’s amazing for prototyping or niche parts

There are companies with big print farms that offer this service. But of course it’s limited to materials that can be 3D printed, and if the product reaches a certain scale, it’s likely best to invest in injection molding or some other process.

That said, for smaller scale products, news businesses, or things where 3D printing is the only way the thing can exist, these services exist.

"You still can't print a high-tolerance metal part at scale and cost-effectively..."

Dan Gelbart has a response (with caveats)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgPW2672s4

oh wow - that's cool! - Thanks so much for sharing!

It turns out there's a massive speed advantage to parallel processing that outweighs the cost of making the molds when you're making hundreds of the same item. Look at a machine that makes plastic bottles - it stamps out something like 1 to 10 bottles per second per machine, by inflating a bubble of plastic inside a mold. You will never ever get that speed with something that only prints one part of the bottle at a time.

Resin printers are kind of parallel but I don't know how much faster they are. And they still won't beat the bottle molding machine.

For serial processing for expensive parts made of strong materials, wasn't there already CNC milling?