Consider the "car." From the ground up, I've got rubber tires with metal belts. Rubber needs to be vulcanized. Of all the pieces of the car, this one is most applicable to 3d printing and I've still got to weave my metal belts (which have to be made out of steel, which has to be run through a drawplate to make wire, which has to be woven to make cord, which has to be woven to make belt) to put inside my 3d printing, which is going to bond poorly, and besides, I'll get maybe 100 miles out of those tires with the matsci we've got now. Sure, maybe in 20 years we'll have polymers that are more badass but rubber is still easier. Next we move up to the wheels - I can either CNC machine those out of aluminum billet, I can drop forge them out of molten aluminum, or I can stamp them out of steel. If I machine them I'm not inducing any additional forging strength so the aluminum has to be thicker. If I forge them out of aluminum they'll look cool and if I stamp them out of steel they'll be cheaper; either way, I'm looking at several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fab equipment. The billet aluminum ends up being cheaper and a lathe/mill combo capable of making a wheel for a car is $10k on the used market minimum. Now we're to the brakes and the hubs. Those have to be forged steel or else everything goes to shit. Not only that, they have to be metalurgically treated nine ways to sunday. The brake pads? An exotic combination of metals and ceramics, bonded at high heat and high pressure. We're already at some pretty goddamn extreme foundry processes and we haven't even made it to the car yet. Sneakers? So long as you're happy with crocs. You could 3d print crocs now. But shoes you want to wear? Any sort of fabric has to be woven, and any woven fabric needs to be sewn. Yeah, you can design it in something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWqS-1F3rjY ...but once you're done, you're still getting out the scissors (or laser cutter) and sewing machine and doing a fair amount of hand work.
Cars won't be printed anytime soon. But a toaster could feasibly be. Even a phone, if you have a sophisticated printer. More interesting to me, doorknobs could have little custom gargoyle faces and cost less than the plain ones at the hardware store. You can print spare keys, coffee mugs, bowls, plates, forks, spoons, that allen wrench that you don't have, etc. Shit is going to go neo-rococo, I think. BTW, physibles?
Suppose you could print thread in shoes the way you say. Is it really going to be cheaper for you to do that than for me to get a sweatshop in Macau to drag thread through fabric? Take your doorknobs. I can cold stamp a doorknob a gazillion at a time. Or, I can 3d print them one excruciating layer at a time. Even if I decide that the gargoyle is worth it, what I"m gonna do is I'm gonna print one gargoyle, then I'm going to make a sandcasting dummy out of it, sprue up about fifty of them, and pour them in potmetal. Maybe I go the extra mile and go brass/bronze. Which are you going to buy: a doorknob that has been 3d printed out of polymer and costs $23: http://www.shapeways.com/model/280625/ Or something forged out of steel that costs $12? http://www.amazon.com/Forged-Iron-Door-Pull-Heart/dp/B003NB0... Hell, take that "evolved" doorknob, print it once and cast it in aluminum and I'll bet I can get it down to $6 per. The 3d printing part of it becomes the part we used to call "artistry" only now instead of working in clay with a knife I'm working in Rhino with a Wacom.
I might be able to get cheaper sneakers from Macau, but they won't be blue and orange and say "Pimp Daddy MK" on the foot print. Well, I wouldn't get those either, but you get the point. Nike won't be able to keep up with what kids want. And what kids want in Cleveland might be totally different than what they want in San Fran. Nike can't be that agile. IMO, that's a real driver that's going to push this before cost is a good argument. Printing is slow. But I met a guy with a makerbot this fall, and his had a little conveyor belt. He could just set it up, and set the number of objects. He said it was very satisfying to hear one drop in the bucket after it came of 'the line'. Each of my gargoyles doorknobs could look different. Heck, I could even have the program make them unique. That's pretty cool. The metal powder stuff is getting better too. When materials research has the demand, no doubt they will meet it.
But that's just it - what are they paying for? They're not paying for jeans they make themselves, they're paying for bespoke products made for them by someone who knows jeans. Do you really want shoes that say "Pimp Daddy MK" on the soles? Or would you pay more for shoes that say "Klogs by Kardashian" or whatever-the-fuck? (fully recognizing that both options are slightly less likely than monkeys flying out of my butt) As #ecib points out, there's nothing preventing you from having wholly custom clothes right now. However, "wholly custom" is something that tends to fly in trade, not in fashion. Skateboarders? Custom decks are great. Fashionistas? They wear what their friends think is cool, and that tends to be brands crafted by experts, and experts know how to use the tools that are best for the job. A 3dprinter, no matter how awesome it gets, will always be the lowest common denominator of fabrication. See this? http://i.imgur.com/A8HEI.jpg That's a jack, about 6" across, that I sandcasted in college. It's garbage-grade aluminum - literally melted beer cans. It took me about 20 minutes to pour sand into the sandcaster, set the molds in, pound 'em flat and pour. It took another ten to get them out, cut them off the sprues and sneak this one into my bag because our shop instructor was a tool who wouldn't let us take our products home. Now, the jack mold existed - it was one of many things I could have cast. In this example, 3d printing a jack would have replaced the mold, and that would be cool. But I only have to do that once. After that, I'm making 12 jacks an hour out of garbage aluminum and they're sitting out in my garden for a dozen years without any problems whatsoever. Suppose I want to go sintered aluminum, a process that, in theory, could be done with 3d printing. It's gonna take half an hour per jack to make one and it's going to cost an order of magnitude more than sandcasting. Meanwhile if sintered aluminum is how we wanna go, a sinter-casting machine (not sure what they cost, but pretty sure it's on the order of "a gajillion dollars") is going to make these things as fast as pennies in a mint. How 'bout another example. See this? http://i.imgur.com/Mqqn9.jpg That's a tile replica from the Ennis House: http://www.ennishouse.org/ You might know it from Blade Runner, among other places: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/518/adfwallpaperbladeru... Now - you could 3d print that. Wouldn't that be cool? Or, you could 3d print one, vacuuform it, and use it as a concrete mold: http://www.wandrlust.net/2007/12/04/frank-lloyd-wright-dance... Hell, you could 3d print one, vacuuform it, pour plaster, make a lot of them, then make entire sheets of the stuff and use it to line the inside of your reality TV show, like we did with something that shall remain nameless because apparently nobody on the internet knows we did it. Here's the thing. I dig 3d printing. But I also dig sandcasting, forging, vacuuforming and other fab processes that are much better suited to the job. The reason 3d printing is big with geeks but not so big with everybody else is that 5 will get you 10 that for any given job, there already exists a better, cheaper, easier way to make it, presuming you want to make more than one. And most things, if it's worth making one it's worth making a dozen.
I agree that for any given object, especially now, there's probably a better way to go about it. But the advantage of the printer is the versatility. As materials improve, printers improve, and costs come down, I think the open-endedness of it will provide for some cool surprises. Basically, I don't think we disagree that much here. As for the jeans, you are right. I'm sure you can get $600 jeans in Grosse Pointe or a few places around Detroit, but you won't get much awe factor. Awe on Investment would be low. You can get plenty of proper awe on an overpriced car in the Detroit Metro, but jeans, not so much. Cool stuff by the way. I dig building too.
Oh yes they will: http://www.converse.com/#/products/shoes/converseOne/scratch... :)
