Has anyone already thought of using a 3D-printer to make fancy knives?

Carbon and graphite can be used like plastic to make items commonly done in metals for much less weight and faster. It's not going to be 20 years, and it's going to be mass production.

You're going to see the day where people don't ship items, they send the code and it prints out the item at the other location. This is not science fiction, it's within 5 years of being a reality.

Imagine no big rig trucks, no going to stores with stuff on the shelf, no warehousing of unwanted, excess, items for future demand. Huge energy savings, major cost savings, major loss of real estate values, major unemployment. People are quickly becoming obsolete.

And when you tie this production capablity to artificial intelligence you have self repairing and reproducing machines. Who needs zombies. The third world will be unable to compete with the learning curve for these technologies (as will most of the rest of the world) leaving huge pools of unemployable bodies with no hope of improving their lifestyle.
 
eisman said:
Carbon and graphite can be used like plastic to make items commonly done in metals for much less weight and faster. It's not going to be 20 years, and it's going to be mass production.

You're going to see the day where people don't ship items, they send the code and it prints out the item at the other location. This is not science fiction, it's within 5 years of being a reality.

Imagine no big rig trucks, no going to stores with stuff on the shelf, no warehousing of unwanted, excess, items for future demand. Huge energy savings, major cost savings, major loss of real estate values, major unemployment. People are quickly becoming obsolete.

And when you tie this production capablity to artificial intelligence you have self repairing and reproducing machines. Who needs zombies. The third world will be unable to compete with the learning curve for these technologies (as will most of the rest of the world) leaving huge pools of unemployable bodies with no hope of improving their lifestyle.
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It would be great to explore other materials, that's a possibility. Not shipping items and making them at home isn't mass production, though. It's bringing the production to the masses. It might be like the early days of PC's when desktop publishing and so much more became possible for everybody. It's hard to see what this next revolution, if it does turn out to be one, will go though. I never would have envisioned the social networking of today when Pc's were new.

When I was a kid we thought that we would have flying cars by now but science fiction had computers the size of desks.

This 3d printing is just another result of cheap processing power actually.

3d printing is just CNC machining (in reverse). A little nozzle squirts plastic like a tiny glue gun and builds it up using numbers in X,Y, and Z, using the same files which CAM systems have used for machining for years. Who'da thought these technologies would come to this? We don't know where it will end up. It will be interesting.

I still think we're going to remove material to make stuff when we're making a lot of it for a while. But there are many exciting things about this technology, the biggest of which is it being cheap enough for everyone to have one. The prototyping done right now is huge also.

Not meant as an argument or rebuttal, I'm just rambling. Whatever is made of this, it'll be amazing. If metals are hard to do or take longer to figure out, good point about alternate materials.
 
re eisman reply ,
carbon and graphite to go against a high end super steel ? 5 years ? maybe your right i sure hope so !
im sure we are heading in to the "diamond age " as in stone age iron age .
but for a printed form of carbon to match all the quality's of a fixed blade forged in high end steel in 5 years time and mass production ! ? that would be impressive .
we still struggle to match the craftsmanship of a few hundred years ago .
as far as self repairing machines and no trucks on the road , i give that 18years ....
the knee of the curve might be close but im hopeful of a soft take off !
also a lot of third world country's are unhindered by copy wright laws and might surpass more law abiding nations in certain areas of technology ?
 
Solid Concepts in Austin, Texas has made a fully functional 3D gun months ago and so a knife should be fairly easy to make from about any steel. I imagine the only thing that might need to be adjusted would be the final edge which could be easily done.
 
Im waiting for technology (I don't know what it is called so I'll just give an example) that would allow you to wear a weapon in plain sight disguised as something like a wrist bangle. When you need the weapon to be a blade, you just touch a few spots of the bangle in sequence and it disassembles and reassembles into a knife on a molecular level. An alternate touch sequence would reassemble it into a gun, including ammunition.
 
Charlie Mike said:
Im waiting for technology (I don't know what it is called so I'll just give an example) that would allow you to wear a weapon in plain sight disguised as something like a wrist bangle. When you need the weapon to be a blade, you just touch a few spots of the bangle in sequence and it disassembles and reassembles into a knife on a molecular level. An alternate touch sequence would reassemble it into a gun, including ammunition.
Click to expand...

I think that one may be beyond our lifetimes.
 
Reloading would only require placing it on matter that it would "draw" from.
 
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