Objet of desire
Andy Sandford, editor of Engineering Capacity
I had some friends over for a barbecue the other day, and as they sat in the kitchen staring out at the rain we started chatting about technology - writes Andy Sandford.
I’d just come back from a press trip and was able to astound them with one of the freebies I had bought back – a plastic model of a dinosaur’s head. It was about 50mm long, with a firm dark grey body with a bit of give, sharp and strong white teeth, light grey eyes and a soft black rubbery tongue.
No they hadn’t all had too much of the Lidl sherry, the reason they were astounded was that the whole thing had been made using 3D printing, a layer at a time. “It’s just like on Star Trek,” said one of them, and his face lit up like a small child’s when I said he could keep it.
I must confess I was as impressed as they were when I went to the launch of the machine that had made the dinosaur, the Objet260 Connex. What impressed me was how far 3D printing had come from where I thought it was. The new Objet machine uses proven inkjet printing technology so it can sit in an office just like a 2D printer. It is about the size of a dishwasher and, here’s the clever bit, it can print up to 14 different materials in the same part and print different material combinations in each part on the tray. These can range from the soft rubber material for the dinosaur’s tongue to a tough ABS-like engineering plastic suitable for its teeth. So a designer can go from a concept to a functional prototype in hours – and why stop at one prototype when you can make a whole range of variants at the same time and instantly see which works best?
The technology for 3D printing is now becoming mainstream, and obviously Objet isn’t the only player, but the implications for rapid product development are potentially game-changing.
I’m not that old really – no don’t laugh – but in my half-century or so on the planet I have seen whole industries and technologies disappear – slide rules, cassette players, video recorders, cameras with films, TVs that use cathode ray tubes, fax machines, to name a few my enfeebled brain can still conjure up.
In all areas, from prototyping to making actual products, additive layer manufacturing is having a massive disruptive impact. So who knows which of today’s manufacturing technologies could soon go the way of the – dare I say it – dinosaurs?
Andy Sandford
