3D printing death of commercial and custom knife making industry?

[sideways]

Piracy didn't kill the film industry. Last I checked nicolas cage and adam sandler are still making bad movies.

 

[marcinek]

You could get your 3D printer and a subscription to a few knife makers. Once a month the machine would fire up and buzz out a new blade, and scales, and sheath. You might have to do some finishing and detail/assembly work.

Wouldn't even have to worry about the TSA. You could fly to another city and use the printer in your hotel suite to print out a knife.

Isn't that what a custom knife maker does now?

And if you fly to another city, print out the knife on the hotel printer that has all the cartidges need to print out whatever one of the guests want to print...you still gotta bring the blade back and worry about the TSA. Again, could just fly out to see your favorite maker right now and have him made a blade.

Dont see what this has to do with any of it.

 

[marcinek]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, chocolate hat!

Sure, but then I'd need the chocolate molecule cartridge. And I have that I'm just gonna drink the darn thing.

 

[marcinek]

Piracy didn't kill the film industry. Last I checked nicolas cage and adam sandler are still making bad movies.

Yes, but what if you could use 3D printing to fuse people molecules together and create multiple Cages and Sandlers!? Think of the amount of bad movies that could make.

Or, just skip them entirely and just 3D print the film without using actors or cameras etc at all.

 

[Jens Schuetz]

For knives I'd be fine with an affordable CNC machine in my garage. Dream....

3d printing and designing everything yourself. Sure for us enthusiasts. Normal people however wouldn't want to spend the time. They might just download a pattern for a fee.

Analogy might be video cameras which everybody has now. We use it for everyday stuff but only a few hobbyists put in the effort to make whole movies and even then they don't come close to the Pros.

 

[davek14]

So a 3D printer will likely become a tool for knife makers/manufacturers to aid their designs. But 3D printing is very uneconomical for mass production of a product.

You can't heat treat steel with a 3D printer.

Regarding heat treatment of steel, I think with this new 3D printing technology that fuses individual molecules together it may not be as important as it was before.

Could you send me a link on that molecule fusing if you can find one? 3D printing has huge potential in low quantity production of plastic parts. I've only heard of a sintering process or molten extrusion for metals, both of which are (at least were) slow, costly and inefficient.

We've been playing with the machines at work,,, they are SLOW.
It can take hours, often overnight to make something.
Now Glowforge,,, that's a different story, it's a 3D laser printer,, but to my knowledge it can't cut thick steel.
CNC is much faster.

Checked out Glowforge, pretty sweet. It's essentially a home version of an industrial CNC laser. That could be really fun. I'm going to have to follow that. I always thought of a laser as 2d compared to a CNC machining center though. It's 2 axis and not 3 anyway. Neat though. Not a garage CNC machine as I would also dream of, but a spare bedroom laser ain't bad.

CNC machines are too expensive and won't be in every home anytime soon! Most people don't need them!

But I do think that 3D printers will become so cheap in 5-10 years like every other technology before it, including regular ink printers, that they will be in every home!

In the beginning, it was only printing fragile plastics, now few years later it's printing stronger, tougher plastics and metals!
Who can say what type of materials it will be able to print in 5-10 years time?

I don't see actual 3d printing of metals being competitive with our standard machining technologies for metal anytime soon. Still, the printing of ever harder plastics does have a huge potential future. A previous employer had a few 3d printers and used them extensively for prototype parts. I asked one engineer about the usefulness of printing plastic parts which would ultimately have to be made from metal and he told me that they would last at least a few months running on the machine. Many parts were prototyped and perfected by the engineers and their printers before ever hitting the shop floor. Not so many years ago the prototypes had to be run through manufacturing.

There's that, and there's making plastic stuff at home. Just plastic printing has a potential market. They do need to get better before they catch on in the general public though. I hear they're pretty buggy. I think of them like PC's in the DOS days, serious hobbyists only.

 

[Danke42]

Isn't that what a custom knife maker does now?

And if you fly to another city, print out the knife on the hotel printer that has all the cartidges need to print out whatever one of the guests want to print...you still gotta bring the blade back and worry about the TSA. Again, could just fly out to see your favorite maker right now and have him made a blade.

Dont see what this has to do with any of it.

The custom maker will still make the knives but he'll also make the patterns (or "programs"). Sure you could fly in to buy a knife. What if you travel a lot, are you going to have hundreds of custom knives orbiting the country in advance of yourself?

As for after you just drop it in the recycling slot. It gets broken down into it's components for re-use by the 3D shredder.

This is not an around the next bend scenario. This is decades in the future when the machines have progressed past what they are now.

 

[sideways]

Yes, but what if you could use 3D printing to fuse people molecules together and create multiple Cages and Sandlers!? Think of the amount of bad movies that could make.

Or, just skip them entirely and just 3D print the film without using actors or cameras etc at all.

Or you could have bad writing and then you wouldn't even need to print more of them. Like all those jean claude van damme movies where he plays both leading roles.

 

[Comeuppance]

As stated, heat treatment is a big hurdle for 3D knife printing. It could greatly assist in the production of parts, however - we'll likely see more custom hardware and intricate handles as this technology becomes more viable and refined.

The chemistry of a blade, however, is beyond the capabilities of any 3D printer thus far. A 3D printer and a CNC machine are about as good as it's going to get for a while.

 

[Mike Read]

Kodak didn't take digital photography seriously I believe!

I looked into 3D printing machines for printing in Titanium and made some enquiries. It wasn't easy to get prices for machines but a salesman gave me a ball park figure of £800K so about $1.2 million.

Needless to say I have put the idea to one side for a while! But who knows the future.

 

[davek14]

3D printers are actually just a glue gun type extruder building up a plastic part with a CNC type program.

No really new technology, just CNC software, micropocessors, servo motors, etc. which have become cheap and ubiquitous now.

 

[Danke42]

I think the kindle may be a better comparison. It's not obsoleted books yet. Instead it lives in a parallel world.

 

[ocnLogan]

I could see 3d printing being a good thing for custom sheath makers, and other "accessories" as well. Right now a sheath maker either needs to have the knife, or at least one of the same model to create a sheath for it. With a 3d printer you could scan it/make a model, and have the maker print a plastic replica of it to fit the sheath, without having to ship/risk a custom knife in the mail.

Same thing with scales. While I wouldn't want any scales made by a current 3d printer, I would be totally fine with it for testing out designs/contouring.

 

[bhyde]

3D printers typically have horrible resolution depending on the technology.

I use 4 of them at work...3 FDM's and 1 Stereolithography.

The resin for the Stereolithography (SLA) is around $2k/~1gallon.
The ABS M30 for the FDM's is around $300-400 for ~90 cubic inches


The good;

1)Prototypes can be handled with little regard to shape in a few days to a few hours depending on volume.
2)Complex shapes that cannot be machined in a traditional sense can be made easily on a 3d printer
3)Requires almost no skill to run for the most part. The SLA does require some troubleshooting skills when bad things happen.
4)Economic home user models have nearly the same quality as expensive commercial versions from what I have seen.
5)New materials are being developed at a good pace.


The bad;

1)Generally expensive materials- Home user stuff is pretty cheap (PLA)
2)File support is limited to .STL files- Pretty crappy file for both file size and resolution. File size=resolution.
3)Poor layer bonding with most thermoformed plastics such as ABS. Delamination is a problem with FDM but not so much with SLS


3D printing metal is cost prohibitive in my lifetime and I suspect, many on this board. The power requirements are not insignificant.

On the gun that was printed- You probably didn't get the details, but I don't think it was printed net shape. Likely, there were some machining operations after printing.
Most holes are not round- (think about printing in layers)

Just my thoughts anyway.

 

[Shotgun]

I'm still waiting on my jet pack.

 

[onojoe]

The media suppliers will make it too expensive to print. We still buy books and magazines instead of printing them out.

 

[hatchettjack]

I want my condo on saturns rings

 

[atavist]

Personally I think advances like 3d printing will if anything make the custom craftsman/bladesmith more in demand.... as society moves to more disposable mass produced products the desire for an actual hand forged and hand crafted artisan blade will increase in it's own right as a counterbalance.

 

[chopsaki]

I see this the same way as when people bring up smart watches on the watch forums I frequent. They talk about how the swiss watch industry will be impacted by the new apple watch ect. I see many parallels to this and custom knives vs. 3D printers.

People that buy custom knives or high end timepieces look at the product in a completely different way than the casual user. Craftsmanship, fit and finish, heritage, innovation ect ect. When you are taking about a certain level of craftsmanship there are always a group of people that appreciate and have passion for the product.

 

[Etna]

3D printing is not going to become mainstream for at least another decade in my opinion.

To begin with, support at the operating system level is still at its infancy. Windows, OS X and Linux offer some degree of support for 3D printing in the form of system libraries and whatnot but in the end, the decision of which platform to support is still very much at the hands of the manufacturers. If manufacturers decide that they only want to make drivers for Windows (especially where OS X and Linux command significant usage in various specialized fields), then it's not going to sit well with potential users.

Secondly, 3D printing is not as straightforward as ink or laser / LED printing. In the latter, all that is needed is the file (document or image type) to print, and that's it. For 3D printing, CAD software is almost mandatory, and most free CAD viewers either only support a couple of specific formats or otherwise just do a bad job reading them (AutoCAD's DWG formats are protected so free CAD viewers can only hope to reverse engineer enough of the format to at least make sure that the file can be opened, just like how OpenOffice or LibreOffice or virtually any other Microsoft Office alternative always returns formatting issues when attempting to open an Office file). And the amount of people out there who can actually use CAD proficiently other than structural engineers, draftsmen and designers? Virtually 0.

Lastly, 3d printing of metal is still not possible with today's technology.