Desktop Fabrication - Something to Wonder at...

To further make a point on why I start my 'newsreading' every day with Instapundit...I ran across his link to this desktop fabrication project

For the non-geek among us, this is essentially a 'Three Dimensional Printer' but using acrylics and various vinyls instead of ink. The current output, of course, is pedestrian to say the least but it's a short path to adding a dremel tool and another two axis system to the 'head'.
And when that happens the hobbyist willl have, in effect, his own version of a million dollar industrial CNC machine... those huge robots that can turn a block of metal alloy into anything that can be imagined.

While this still wont induce much enthusiasm to most, I have to point out that the Desktop Computer which you're using to read this, began as a hobby kit for geeks in much the same way. The younger among us wont usually have realized that... they might think that IBM or Apple invented it.

The answer to that is no; although both played a huge role, but that's a subject for a totally different series of chapters in 'why things are'.

And, unlike the Open Source Project which most of us now know as 'Linux', the effort is not just to replicate something that's already available for a few hundred dollars. But like the initial Linux project and the hobbyist micro-computer, the immediate goal is nothing in particular.. rather the ability to 'do something' unusual.

But we better look to that to see where this is going. It took only ten years from the first hobby kit to the Apple II and ten more for the PC to go mainstream consumer, where the idea was not so much to have a computer but to buy it to accomplish something else.... then ten MORE where it's unusual for a household to NOT have a computer.

No, I'm not saying the result might be a 'Personal Replicator' in the near future, I'm saying this is a foretelling of the future of manufacturing.

Nope, the stuff on store shelves will still be mass produced. The economies arent, and never will be, there to knock off the parts for a toaster somewhere on the other side of town. But to MAKE those parts right now requires dedicated facilities. Which results in 'just in time' warehousing for the parts to assemble those toasters.

Gradually, as a result of hobbyists like this, the toaster assembly lines themselves will become 'universal and it will take just minutes to shift from making toasters to making 'George Foreman grills'.

But that's not the main effect. Commercialization of this concept will result in great strides in everything from Automotive repair - Think collision repair where you just run the damaged car into a series of huge versions of these... the machines cut away or straghten the damaged areas, then the finish line applies a smoothing subfinish and paint and rolls out the car good as new - to manufacturing itself.
Break a part on the assembly line or assembly robot? Just log onto the vendor's website and load the part parameters into your local 'replicator'.

Or you have a vintage car and you need a part for it.. no problem, as the "Orange County Chopper' program shows, you just enter the part dimensions into your fabricator.

Of course, it will still take a while for this to reach the same level that has been taken for granted in Science Fiction books for the last 50 years...The only note usually take of the 'replicator' is for meals, where some mytery foodstock {tofu?} is transformed into any dish we want.


Yes, it will truly be a great new world, at least from the consumer view, but it wont happen because some nanny state legislated it, will it.

In fact, your erstwhile elitist/socialists will attempt to limit the application of the concept or prohibit it altogether... but that's another book as well.