GT Drumline

Firstly lets clarify what is meant by 3D printing, well in a nut shell it is a way of fabricating objects designed on computer, for example if you designed a mug using computer aided design, within a few hours you could have the real thing sitting in front of you. It is possible to watch your very creations come to life in true Star Trek fashion, before your very eyes. To go into more detail, currently printers are fairly slow, limited and not tremendously precise. A home 3D printer will typically set up back about ten thousand pounds, but this is cheap considering the first commercially available printers cost at least ten times that amount. 3D printers presently are capable of fabricating objects using silicon and certain types of metal, other substances that have been tested are plaster, play-doh and even chocolate! A home 3D printer is about the size of a Micr caralluma owave and connects directly to a desktop computer running software that controls its operation. It then creates objects layer-by-layer by squeezing material from a mechanically-controlled syringe. Unfortunately printers are somewhat limited in the sense they still produce a fairly rough end product and the time scale it takes to print an object is considerable. Despite all the technical implications, there are huge possibilities for the future of 3D printing. All ground breaking technology starts somewhere, for example in the case of the PC, mainframes had existed for years, but personal computing only took off in the late seventies. A cheap self-assembly computer called the Altair 8800, launched in 1975, sparked the rapid development of personal computing. In similar circumstances self assembly 3D printers hope to spark the same rapid development in rapid prototyping.