3D Printing stuff - hostile takeover of Planned Obsolescence thread

[pmrid]

I have a theory - or to be honest, someone else had it well before me. Planned obsolescence. ANyone else read those Vance Packard book way back when Ralph Nader was the great consumer champion?

Anyway, I digress. I have just had another few example of how a shard of plastic keeps most machines together.

A smoke alarm - getting it off the ceiling for cleaning broke a tiny plastic tab - which turns out to be what holds the thing in its cradle. No tab, no hold. New Smokle alrarm on order.

Second example, an electric chainsaw - oil feed to the cutter bar turned out to be via a bit of plastic tube which, on opening the beast up for inspection, had crumbled into flakes and shards and the oil reservoir was emptying into the electric motor housing.

Third example, a hand drill - good brand - worked well, no mechanical or electrical problems, But the plastic case just split in half at the elbow where handle meets top part. Vendor said "tough". Very impressed. Just plastic. But what rubbish.

If these were isolated examples, I'd probably not be on my high horse. But they aren't. I reckon there are thousands of similar stories out there. A bit of plastic breaks and it's cheaper to buy a new one than go through the rigmarole of returning to manufacturer/vendor who will, most probably either ignore you or fob you off.

DOn't you just love it!!

Peter

[AndrewJ]

Gday Peter

Ref the first and best masters of the game.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
I really liked the bit on how they actually did quite a lot of research and spent a LOT of money on making sure the devices were so well made that they failed at the given time. ( Bit like printer cartridges ;))
Andrew

[AussieTrooper]

There are two causes of this, but it's largely the fault of the consumer (and the horse has bolted. I can't see any way of going back). If we didn't buy this stuff, they wouldn't sell it.
The amount of manufacturing that has gone broke in Australia because a cheaper version of the same thing is now made in China is just staggering.
Have a look at the lines of people ready to go out and buy the next marginally better iPhone, when they already have a perfectly functioning one that will likely be thrown away. There's no reason at all for the manufacturer to make something that lasts more than a year or so.

The other is deliberate, planned obsolesence. I remember being taught about it at uni (engineering degree.) When the consumer has killed off any manufacturer who makes products built to last, this is all you are left with.

[AussieTrooper]

On the topic of lightbulbs, we were also taught another interesting fact at uni.
One of the lecturers was involved in a project testing fluorescent tubes from different brands. When analysing the light spectrum and physical characteristics from different brands at different prices, the inescapable conclusion was that this was the exact same tube. He even went so far as to say he believed them all to originate from the same factory.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Ben

Sounds like a lot of telescope stuff these days.
All made in one place and given a different coat of paint/sticker.

Andrew

[eddiedunlop]

3-D printing may be a game changer once it's cheaper and more easily accessible.

[Larryp]

An friend of mine used to be the financial controller for a very popular brand of power tools and gardening equipment. He told me that the service life for their less expensive range of electric drills was only one hour!
He pointed out that the average home handyman would actually take a while to use the drill for one hour, but I guess that's the planned obsolescence we get today.

[brian nordstrom]

:shrug: 99% of todays car,s front and rear "Clips" are held on by your plastic tabs/clips hence the name and you see quite a few older cars driving around with them hanging off , broken plastic tabs , rubbish!!.

Brian.

[AussieTrooper]

I hope so. :thumbsup:

[AndrewJ]

unless your printer is also built with planned obsolescence in it:rofl::rofl:
Just imagine yr printer wears down and you cant print new
bits for it ( guides, brgs, motors etc ), and no one keeps spares.

Andrew

[AussieTrooper]

The natural progression is for 3D printers that can print in different materials. Probably a long way off though.
Would be interesting how this gets handled from a copyright point of view.

[AndrewJ]

I like the idea someone floated of using stripped down food chemicals in cartridges such that you can print a "meal" Yummmmmmm
As to 3D printing in other materials, the stuff being printed using titanium etc for medical, auto and aerospace is already here.
Ref http://3dprinting.com/metal/
http://3dprintingsystems.com/additive-manufacturing-using-metals/
etc
The resolution they can get with this stuff is just mind boggling,
( as is the price at present )

Andrew

[AstralTraveller]

I have a pair of AR speakers of mid-70's vintage. In those days the bass drivers had foam edge supports. These eventually went brittle and fell apart. A mate who is in the sound game said I could either by original AR drivers or other drivers with exactly the same specifications that were made in the same factory but sold for about a fifth the price. Guess what I did? They sound better (tighter) than the originals.

[julianh72]

Well, since you can pick up a 3D printer for around a grand or less at mainstream bricks-and-mortar retailers (and even less if you shop on-line or build your own), the game has already changed for some of us! There is a rapidly growing number of council libraries and the like where you can access a 3D printer for the cost of the consumables - check your local library service's web page to see if they have any.

When something breaks in our house, the first thing I do is take a look and see if I can replicate the broken part on my 3D printer. It's surprising how often you can - and how often you can make the replacement part stronger than the original.

There's an undeniable personal pride from using something that you saved from a one-way trip to the dump!

[julianh72]

The commercial 3D printers are indeed designed as "appliances" with built-in obsolescence - built down to a price, and designed to lock you into buying the manufacturer's filaments and spare parts. (Just like 2D printers - they practically give them away, but the ink cartridges cost as much as liquid gold!)

No such issues if you buy or build an "open source" design (based on the RepRap project designs http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page ) - all the plans are available on-line (including those for all commercial derivations which are based on earlier designs, due to the open-source licensing model), which means you can make upgrades for your machine as the designs improve. RepRap 3D printers were conceived from the get-go to maximise the amount of printable parts, and those bits which are not printable are designed to use widely available bog-standard components (steel rods, stepper motors, bearings, etc) which you may have lying around at home, or can pick up at the local hardware store.

If you find a non-standard component such as a stepper motor that you want to use (e.g. from a discarded scanner or printer), and you can't find an existing design based on it, you measure it and design and print the mount and install it. You may need to do a bit of experimenting with the firmware to allow for its operating characteristics (e.g. number of steps per full rotation), but that's standard practice for calibrating and tuning your printer even when you build to a standard design, and it's half the fun of an open-source 3D printer!

Sure, some component designs use custom-machined components or exotic materials, but there is always a cheap, simple alternative.

And even when your printer breaks a part that you don't have a spare for, you can print it on a mate's machine or at the local library.

[Neutronstar]

One trick with 3D printing is not owning one.

IF you can design the part you can always upload the design to a 3D printing service. They will 3D print with all sorts of materials including gold and platinum. Then they post the part. Install it.

The trick will be to get your design correct. The software is even free.

PS: I won't list any services, google is your friend.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Julian

I have no probs with the current units printing in extruded plastic at relatively coarse sizes being "disposable".
I was more thinking about really useful 3D printing in metals using laser / ion beam deposition etc.
It would be like having a "precise parts" shop in yr spare room :-), as you would then have the accuracy to print fine threads etc that wont crumble or fall apart under a bit of load.
Machines like that wont be "appliances", and based on the fact they would be able to print "weapons", i dont think they will become available for the hoi polloi any time in the near future.
Andrew

[julianh72]

You might be surprised to see what is already available from commercial on-line 3D printing services. Stainless steel, bronze, brass etc are already available for a couple of dollars per cc of finished product. (I imagine they take a look at uploaded files to see if they look like gun parts before they send the parts back to you. Hint: Calling your uploaded file "Kalashnikov_Firing_Pin.stl" would probably trigger a few alarms!)

There are a number of people working on home-built metal printing technologies, with some success, but it's fair to say that an affordable desktop machine which can make solid steel nuts and bolts is a little way off - but probably closer than you realise. While commercial machines capable of working in pure metal are still pretty expensive, you can already buy metal-filled plastic filament that will work in off-the-shelf consumer-grade 3D printers.

Eg 80% bronze (or copper) / 20% PLA filament will make parts which can be sanded and polished to a high metallic shine with virtually no visible 3D printing layers, and can be finished and machined like solid metal parts. The finished printed parts aren't as strong as solid metal, but they're a reasonable alternative for many applications.

You can buy these metal-filled filaments for about $90 per 750 g reel ($0.12 per gram - or less than a dollar per cc).

[julianh72]

If you need high-strength parts (or exotic materials etc), it is a good idea to 3D print your prototypes in low-cost plastic, either on your own printer, or at the library etc. Do your concept design and design development for fit and function etc using low cost plastic, and only commit to more expensive materials when you have a good working design. You can do several iterations for the design of a small part in an evening, and then place your final order for the real thing with a high degree of confidence that it will be what you want.

(In fact, that's EXACTLY what happens in industrial "rapid prototyping" workshops!)

[AndrewJ]

Gday Julian

I have been following the evolution of these higher quality devices for a while, so have a good idea of what is possible commercially.
I was looking more at making stuff with astro sized threads built in using "consumer" 3D units.
Looking at this
http://www.designboom.com/technology/nanoscribe-nanoscale-3d-printed-microstructures/
shows the precision can be achieved easily, just a matter of strength and durability of the finished product.
In theory, the machine should be relatively cheap once all the design problems re calibration etc get refined, but i doubt the govt would want these things in the wild.
Imagine being able to "print" a custom designed thin wall OTA for a refractor etc "in the shed" :-)

Andrew

[julianh72]

There's a few separate issues here - the physical capability to work in metal etc, the precision / repeatability of the manufactured parts, and what the government wants (or doesn't want).

Working in metal and other "serious" engineering materials is already "here and now", either through a commercial service, or through the still-emerging domestic technologies. When you think about it, the government can't stop this - the genie is already out of the bottle. There's no real philosophical difference between "additive" manufacture (3D printing) and "subtractive" manufacture (milling and machining) - and there's no way that the government could (or should) stop people from machining steel. The big game changer is that additive manufacture opens up all sorts of possibilities and efficiencies that subtractive manufacture stumbles on.

Accuracy and tolerances are a different matter - 3D printing currently tends to have relatively poor tolerances compared to milling / machining (but its improving all the time). If you wanted to make a gun, it would be a LOT easier to machine one than to print it using current technology! The optimal technology for home workshops will probably be a combination of additive and subtractive manufacture - e.g. design parts which can be built quickly and cheaply using additive manufacture, and can then be finished using subtractive techniques where high precision is required.

You will already see that part of the art of design for 3D printing is to recognise where the tolerances are likely to be poor by traditional standards, and design around it. This means recognising that building your part in horizontal layers will tend to make it stronger in the horizontal plane than the vertical axis, and designing and aligning your parts accordingly. Another example is that it is hard to get holes made accurately, whether they are vertical or horizontal. The trick is that you design holes to be somewhat under-sized and ream them out after printing; another trick is the classic RepRap "tear-drop" holes for horizontal holes, which allows them to be made without needing any internal support for the overhangs. If you need a mechanical anchor, you create a pocket (even blind pockets are trivially simple for a 3D printer to make!), and insert a steel nut, and it will grip a steel screw very firmly.

When it comes to "astro-parts" there are some parts which absolutely NEED very high stability and precision (I'm thinking of the whole optical train, motorised axis drive trains, etc), and others where overall precision need not be very high - here I'm thinking of accessory mounts and so on. 3D printing is already well suited to the latter, and I see no fundamental reason why it can't be used even for many high-precision parts, as long as you understand the materials and build technologies you are working with, and design accordingly.

For example, when you realise that a home-built RepRap printer can position the print-head reliably and repeatedly to just a few microns in 3 dimensions, you realise that very high precision can be achieved using plastic gears, rubber drive belts, steel threaded rods, and so on. The dimensional tolerances of the finished parts tend to be restricted by the shrinkage after placement, rather than the build-accuracy. You could certainly 3D-print the gear "blanks" for a drive train, but you might need to allow for the final milling and finishing to be done using conventional CNC machining or similar. (Even that's not necessarily true - the extruder on my RepRap uses a 3D-printed gear train which has had no post-processing or finishing whatsoever.)

(Somehow, we're a long way from a strictly astro-related thread, but 3D printing is another of my passions - and it fills in the cloudy nights very well!)

[AndrewJ]

Gday Julian

Just a few:).
Being a Mech Eng, i understand a lot of the tradeoffs that go into this stuff, but once the process is refined to the point that metal printing becomes as normal as photocopying or printing a letter, it will be a gamechanger.

Dunno there. The tolerances of some of the nano printed stuff i linked to is certainly getting into the realms of fine turning/milling. The biggest problem is to get the accuracy, it costs time, and time is money, so it may not be cost effective commercially yet, but for a personal unit in the shed, it would be irrelevant.
My only concern is how strong the finished product would be for thin products like optical train adapters etc.
Sintered products may not cut it, but the newer techniques of laser melting of mixed raw element powders to give "designed alloys" looks really promising.

Dont think so anymore:D ( and they have a govt license:sadeyes:)
https://www.stratasysdirect.com/blog/how-its-made-3d-printed-1911-pistol/
http://3dprint.com/21109/3d-print-metal-gun-reason/
The big advantage of getting the printing process right is it effectively makes a jobbing machine shop obsolete for msny things, as anyone can make something in their spare room. Thats the scary bit.

Thats why its called "General Chat"
However, to try and get it back to something astro:rofl:
I also see they are now printing glass
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540926/3-d-printing-breaks-the-glass-barrier/
whilst its still crude at present, imagine if they can get to the point of printing mirrors to nano precision using various ceramics. Lots of new optical designs, esp for mirrors may open up.

Andrew
its an amazing world we are living in

[julianh72]

The PiKon - a 3D-printed telescope (from about 12 months ago):
http://pikonic.com
http://top43dprinting.com/university-of-sheffields-3d-printed-telescope-takes-its-first-moon-photographs/

[AndrewJ]

Gday Julian

Sorry no wabbit
They bought the mirror:D

Andrew

[julianh72]

When you are working with new materials and fabrication technologies, you need to develop a different mindset, and re-design the parts accordingly.

I'm reminded of when the first cast iron bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge was constructed in 1777-1781 (at Ironbridge, Shropshire) - while all the structural members were made from the new-fangled cast iron, all of the jointing and detailing followed established practices for working in heavy wood (use of dovetails and dowels, etc). It took many years for new design details to be developed which were optimised for the characteristics of the new material.

In the case of 3D printed parts made on a "low precision" hobby printer from extruded plastic, rather than striving for the precision and strength that can be achieved with machined aluminium, it makes more sense to accept that extruded PLA or ABS is less strong, less stiff and less dimensionally precise (in its unfinished state), so you make your parts thicker (they will probably still weigh about the same as a functionally-equivalent thin-wall aluminium machined part), and provide a "machining allowance" and / or attach machined metal parts for the critical face-to-face connections. You really need to start with a proper "functional definition" of the part (critical vs non-critical dimensions, strength, stiffness, mass, etc), and redesign it to meet the functional requirements and material / fabrication characteristics, rather than just replicating the metal prototype.

To put a few numbers to it - a 50 mm ID / 1 mm wall thickness tube 100 mm long made from aluminium (e.g. a camera extension tube or similar) would weigh about 45 g (although the full part with T-thread adaptors etc will be rather heavier). If you print a PLA tube with the same internal diameter and length but use a 3 mm wall, it will have a mass of about 60 g. The 3 mm PLA tube will have about 60% of the physical strength (bending or tension) of the 1 mm aluminium tube, but a part such as this is probably more governed by stiffness and durability than it is by strength. A better design for the PLA might actually be a 2 mm tube with a few longitudinal stiffeners, for example - which is trivial to design and make on a 3D printer, but quite challenging to make from aluminium stock if your only machining equipment is a lathe.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Julian

You are making me recall long hours in the "Design for Production" lectures :-)
I have no problem in mindset re designing things to suit the production methods. My original wooden wedge looked nothing like the one i designed when i got a mill and could work alloy plate accurately :-)


Or a 1mm internal and external wall with say 3mm airgap between em and internal honeycomb stiffeners, as that gets the second moment of the cross section up a bit more, with a massive increase in rigidity.

My only query at present is how long before things like strong thinwalled bits with fine threads could be printed cost effectively.
( As an example, an adapter to go into a 2" barrel ( like the Ted Agos Focal reducer carrier ). You want to keep the wall thin so as not to lose any of the lightpath, so designing thicker isnt an option unless you get rid of the std 2" barrel entirely.)

Again, a few years at the current rate of research and it should be trivial.

Andrew

[pmrid]

Gentlemen, as much as I have enjoyed these diversions through the virtues and vices of printing this and that, may I (ever-so-gently) draw you back to the beginning of the thread in which I was bemoaning the evils of planned obsolescence and inviting discussion along those lines.

Peter

[AndrewJ]

Gday Peter

Threads do wander a bit :-)

However, if you had a little laser scanner, you could scan the broken part, and immediately print a replacement.
No more obsolescence due to little plastic bits breaking :-)

Andrew

[AussieTrooper]

Then perhaps we could 3D print spare 3D printer parts in advance. :)

[julianh72]

That's EXACTLY what happens when you build your first 3D printer - print a set of spares!

(Which might instead become the basis your second - improved - 3D printer, so you need to print some spares for that ... )

3D printing can very quickly become a self-fulfilling hobby - you never actually need to look for anything "useful" to print, because there is no shortage of tweaks and upgrades for the printer itself!

[julianh72]

You can do the scanning with a free app on your smartphone, but it is generally better to use a cheap digital caliper to get some accurate measurements of critical dimensions.

Create a 3D CAD model, send it to your 3D printer,and for a few cents' worth of plastic filament - Voila! No more built-in obsolescence. :thumbsup:

[Ausrock]

I have no doubt that "planned obsolescence" exists but I suspect that in many cases it is just as likely that the particular plastic formulation used is not entirely suitable for the job at hand........ie: it's too brittle, too flexible, insufficient or incorrect UV stabilisers used, etc., etc.

[julianh72]

With respect to the change of title to this thread:

I, for one, welcome our new 3D printing overlords!