3D Printed Dress...I would totally wear this....

Hi Summer,

It's impressive that they have a way to produce such a large, flexible item : ) I think many things will move towards a version of fabrication that doesn't rely on traditional labour or tailoring as you suggest. This would allow people to have more custom, unique items, and also produced locally, where skills and labour may not exist to create in traditional ways. When the order is placed, that unique item can be manufactured and supplied.

As I understand, already car manufacturers have some items (e.g. vehicle interior trim) located in different places in the world, so that once the car is shipped from the point of manufacture, the remainder customisation occurs much closer to the customer.

However, how long it will take I'm not sure : ) I thought 3D printers were in their infancy apart from creating prototypes, yet some results (such as this dress) show that maybe things are further ahead that I thought!

It's an interesting (and clever) experiment but miles away from making anything useful or efficiently.

Although 3D printing is often touted as an additive technique (unlike machining form solid) the process used here generated a staggering amount of waste - and it took 2 DAYS to print !

Classical techniques like weaving cutting and stitching are much more efficient - in both machine time and material and energy use.

3D printing has a very long way to go and my bet is that it will be a niche thing - I don't expect to see it replace classical mass production techniques any time soon.

The 'dress' is like so many 3D printed artifacts - hugely compromised to suit the process - how many uses are there for clothes with great big holes in them and plastic parts with loads of little ridges ?

MK

Ah, I didn't realize how excessive the waste material was. I agree, it won't necessarily be 3D printers (at least not like what they are now). And it is definitely a long way to go - I can't imagine seeing moulding machines, CNC mills etc being replaced for a long time for the reasons you mention (speed, energy, waste, etc).

I wonder if it will occur 50 years from now.. I can see it being attractive at some point when/if technology improves on speed, energy and so on, for businesses to be able to create arbitrary rigid objects (tables, chairs etc) locally and have them delivered a short distance, but perhaps those 3D printers will be industrial machines taking bars of material or something. Or we might have ruined the world by then, and time to go back to basics. Good thing I can still use a saw.. : )

Have just watched the video, I can't work out where the wastage is in the process.

It's an excellent proof of concept and if manufacturing technology can improve in the future it might be a viable solution.

3D printing is really only useful for low volume an prototype work at the moment it's simply too slow for  high volume low profit items which really need the old school tooling/ machining methods.

One thing which is holding up the wide spread use of them is that they are slow expensive but more critically require an element of talent to design and create the object .

Most people just want to go to the shop and buy it!

Very true. I'm just trying to work out where a staggering amount of waste was being produced. I know that the video shortened sequences and skipped steps.

Picture 6 at http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/17/tech/innovation/3d-printed-plastic-dress/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5

She isn't wearing that "boulder sized" lump of plastic. I assume it's either support structures or that they used one of the dust sintering processes.

It may be possible to re-cycle plastic dust but I know that when you do it with metal that even the unused dust need reprocessing.

MK

I believe that boulder is the finished dress buried in the unbound dust material. The dust is blasted away and can typically be reused.

The dust is reusable, This really depends on the technology.

A lot of these are actually Gypsum dust and is specified as recyclable not least that in many designs only about 5% of the material dispensed is in the finished product so there is a big need for this.

This "plastic" dress may actually be a gypsum one because they use "plastic" binders to hold the parts together so this may be where the "plastic" comes from!

The dust is reusable, This really depends on the technology.

A lot of these are actually Gypsum dust and is specified as recyclable not least that in many designs only about 5% of the material dispensed is in the finished product so there is a big need for this.

This "plastic" dress may actually be a gypsum one because they use "plastic" binders to hold the parts together so this may be where the "plastic" comes from!