3D printing

the actual process of 3D printing is about as interesting to watch in real-time as ants building out their tunnels in an ant farm. It happens slowly, with tiny mechanisms adding slice after slice, layer after layer, until you have something that actually looks like a recognizable shape. It’s something you only need to see a handful of times, and is best seen as a time lapse.

Industrial scale 3D printers have for a long time now threatened to change the face of traditional assembly line manufacturing, but it hasn’t really kicked-off the revolution yet. The greatest known limitation of additive manufacturing is its inability to mass-produce. To replace the millions of parts manufactured daily in an assembly line in a factory in China by additive manufacturing would mean installing vast numbers of industrial scale 3D printers that would demand astronomical capital investments that would not be economically competitive.