A Fab@Home loaned by Lipson will be on view at London's Science Museum from May 22 until January 2009. Part of the Evolving Plastics exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Bakelite -- the first fully man-made plastic -- visitors will see the Fab@Home close-up and watch a time-lapse video of objects being made.
"Rapid manufacturing has profoundly massive implications for the way we make things. It changes everything, it changes the designs that you do," said Richard Hague, who heads the rapid manufacturing research group at Loughborough University.
Hague was very practical at school, enjoying the challenge of taking things to pieces and, mostly, putting them back together again. Following an uninspiring spell in the oil and gas industry, he then studied for a doctorate in rapid prototyping and hasn't looked back.
Conventional manufacturing requires either machining away a block of material or forming the part in a mold. And as any manufacturer will confirm, "tooling up" is incredibly expensive. Rapid manufacturing techniques use digital data to make the part additively, laying down layers of material that do not need a mould -- just like Lipson's Fab@Home.
"It's extremely Heath Robinson but it's great and it will spark people's imaginations," Hague said.
There are examples of additive manufacturing for consumer items that do away with moulds.
Hague said that some hearing aids are made using a laser sintering process after scanning a wax impression of the ear canal. More exotic applications include components for jet fighters and racing cars.
"We are so locked into a conventional way of designing parts for manufacturing, it's difficult to change. This is quite a buzz area, and so it should be as it takes away the high labor cost," Hague said.
Could a machine like the Fab@Home make copies of itself? Adrian Bowyer, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at Bath University, is working on the RepRap -- a practical self-copying 3D printer. His replicating rapid-prototyper also works by printing layers and has even made some of its own parts.
"Hod [Lipson] is trying to work with a wider range of materials than RepRap and, like we do, he is open sourcing everything. His idea is to have a machine that is very low cost and is open, but that is sold in a conventional marketplace either whole or as a kit," Bowyer said.
If these technologies take off, it may spark a new industrial revolution.
"In 1975, people were soldering together Altair 8800 computers -- that's where RepRap and Fab@Home are now. The Apple II came out in 1977, the BBC Micro and IBM PC in 1981 and then the world was never the same," Bowyer said.
"I think that within 10 years private individuals will be able to make for themselves virtually any manufactured product that is today sold by industry," he said. "I sometimes wonder if politicians realize that the entire basis of the human economy is about to undergo the biggest change since the invention of money."
In that case, fabbing won't just break the mold -- it will throw it away entirely.
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