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Funny you should mention pendulum clocks Alex. I saw a utube (cant find it now) of a clock printed with 2 materials, the second a support structure that melted away in a liquid bath leaving gears etc seperated from each other. He pulled it out of the bath, pushed the pendulum and off it went. The design was utterly impossible to produce in any other way, nothing was removable or replaceable, no screws anywhere.
I sent off a simple design off to an online 3D printing service for a quote (a disk basically). 4 pages came back of the materials they could print with. Amongst others were, stainless steel, ceramic, glass, wood, cake!.
Having said that, home 3D printing is still a bit of a toy. Very few ppl other than hobbyists would need bits printed in plastic, AND, its the design of the object you want to print thats the hard part, its not a trivial excerise designing in 3D, its a huge learning curve, and good design software is quite expensive. Sure there are free apps, but as usual, you get what you pay for.
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