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MakerBot's 3-D printers will soon be able to produce items that look like bronze, limestone, and wood, thanks to a new line of plastic-based composite materials shipping later this year. But the launch may be too little, too late: Entrepreneurs and artists interested in working with metal and wood are already embracing desktop milling machines that can handle the real deal.
The calculation is simple: Buy a MakerBot Replicator, the leading desktop 3-D printer, for $2,889, and you can produce plastic prototypes or the kind of trinkets that you might find in a Happy Meal. Buy a small-scale milling machine like the Othermill, which retails for $2,199, and you can make jewelry and mechanical parts out of everything from aluminum to walnut.
"Once you can cut metal, you can make things that last," says Danielle Applestone, chief executive of Other Machine Co. "For the first couple of months that I was working here, I was scared of cutting with metal. It was louder, I was worried I was going to break the tool. But as soon as I jumped in, it quickly became like wax to me."
"Metal is power, it really is," she says. "You don't go back."
It should be noted that MakerBot's base model also went from $400 to almost $3K when Stratasys acquired them.
Original Submission
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:16AM
After the twentieth "I have done everything and was special while I was doing it" story, I am inclined to no longer believe them.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:10AM
Where I come from, if you have a 4.0 grade point average you go to Stanford, or maybe their Air Force Academy.
But if you totally blow off you studies so you can make telescopes instead of doing your homework, you attend Caltech. My GPA in high school was 3.6 and I failed three quarters of eighth grade English.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:28AM
I get the idea David is another older guy who loves to tinker too. Over time, one does have a tendency to get into damned near everything.
Experiences integrate over time. Given a lot of time, one can get a lot of experience - especially if one is not addicted to sports or social stuff.
I like to read David's accounts and find them quite interesting. I think he's seen a lot of stuff, and took a good whack at a lot of it.
I get the idea David is a lot like my grandpa. I wrote some more stuff about my grandpa later down these comments, again as a reply to one of David's posts.
A lot of what is in me came from grandpa. I only wish I had more of him in me. Every visit to Grandpa for me was better than a trip to Disneyland. Grandpa had made more things than I could shake the proverbial stick at. He would show them to me, start them up, and show me how they worked. Then I had another older guy at Chevron take me under his wing and do the same.
Dave strikes me as the kind of guy who really gets into his work and enjoys it, and it seems to be what both of us live for. These forums are one of the few places we can talk about such things and have anyone even begin to comprehend what we are trying to describe. There was a time this kind of enthusiasm for doing things was welcome in the workplace, but as things became more "lean and mean", work became not nearly as enjoyable as it used to be, and it became like having professional artists paint a house, or having master craftsmen mixing concrete.
Trying to mentor younger people in the manner I was mentored seems to be seen as bullshit. Who gives a hoot if the younger guy is curious as to how refrigeration works? I feel I have been replaced by Google, and I really have no business trying to mentor younger people as I was mentored. If some young kid is interested in refrigeration, let him go look it up - does he really need some old coot showing him all the components of a running system, asking him to feel all the lines, commenting on what's going to happen if this part or that part goes bad, and showing him how the system corrects itself when perturbed?
I relate that because I was a young kid once, long ago, and I was curious how the absorption system kept the LNG tanks cold at the oil refinery, and the senior engineer took me out and explained the whole shebang to me. Yet I find myself in a position today where all I can seem to do is pontificate on SN....
I feel a kindred spirit in David.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:25AM
I feel I have been replaced by Google, and I really have no business trying to mentor younger people as I was mentored.
Go on, you try to stop yourself sharing your enthusiasm with a kindred spirit! You'll fail.
We will always have to show younger people what is possible. Google may be the world's greatest encyclopaedia but without the spark of enthusiasm and the encouragement of possibilities, nothing of real value will be conceived or executed.
It's always been this way. We share our enthusiasm about "our" topic with other people - most will smile and say "nicely done" but there is always one-in-an-hundred that will go "wow... now show me that again... but slowly." and follow up with "now, how did you get that to happen?" Doesn't matter if the topic is cooking, animal husbandry, electronics, or any topic worthy of study - mentors and students will always have a way of finding each other - it may as well be a law of nature.
Just remember that you won't win everybody or even most. The only people that are important is your joy in sharing and that occasional individual that badly wants your knowledge. Don't ever give up - you don't want to miss that single opportunity. You mightn't even know that you have touched someone in a way that pays dividends to many future generations.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @09:27AM
That's what your mom said.
When grandma made that wish, she didn't walk right for a week.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:43AM
Yet more bad moderating on soylent. Say something someone with mod points doesn't like and it is censored by being modded down until it takes extra work just to see it, no matter the content or intent.
Honestly, if anyone anywhere has a story about ever topic that comes up and has claims of how interesting their insight was in every single area then the sane ones among us would call out their bullshit. This was even done in a polite, subjective manner and yet modded as flamebait. If it really is flamebait, then where are the flames?