Fablabs are Fab!

Fablabs are taking one step closer to home usage. This from the NY Times:

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years.

“We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model,” he said. “The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials.”

Others are working on the same idea.

“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”

Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals.

Imagine something that combines the qualities of a printer, a sprayer and an easy bake oven. It's terrific. When the price falls below $600, I am so going to buy one. They won't fall that low? Laser printers have gone from $20,000 to $3,000 in the mid-1980s to the inkjet alternatives today at $60 each. I don't think these will do this low, but it is reason to think they could get a mass market edition below $1000 in the next couple of years.

What will follow that? Open Source 3-D models. About 5% of the population will use this to replace alot of their manufactured items: kitchenware, toys, trinkets. About 5% will buy one and under-utilize them. Lots of places in the middle of nowhere will use these for most of their manufacturing, beholden only their supply of patterns, electricity and raw material. This will lead to the next invention: defablab. A De-Fablab will rip down any material into basic elements. Or, the killer FabLab generation will be the one that can rip anything down and turn it into fodder.