Printing a working 12 inch crescent wrench, name your color, tighten your bolt.

[jmowreader]

57. If I had one of those, I'd already have a wrench

I would like to have one. I would use it in a confectionery business.

Imagine you're getting married and your bride-to-be wants a special, personalized souvenir for her shower. I know...how about chocolate bars with the wedding couple's names on them? She would come to me, I would design her bar, she'd sign off on it and I would make them.

But here's the thing: I would never attempt to print fifty candy bars in chocolate, even though I could. I would print three in plastic, vacuform them in acetyl plastic sheet, and pour tempered chocolate into them.

The same process would work for bars sold at high school games...imagine how many Timberwolf Bars or Viking Bars the local high schools could sell.

I've heard all this before with other things new and technological...oh, online shopping will kill stores. In the end, technology does what it does best and traditional ways do what they do best. The average person wouldn't buy one of these machines. Everything he needs is available commercially. A lot of people who bought one would use it until the novelty wore off. Look in the classifieds of your local paper and you'll find plenty of "used once" items - things people bought because they were going to be so cool, then sold once the cool wore off. The great mass of people are not going to buy an expensive tool to make their own 2010 Dodge Dakota PCV valves when it's quicker and cheaper to buy them at AutoZone.

This is a tool for a limited subset of the population.

The first home users that will buy them are guys who have lathes and table saws. They made all the cabinets in their kitchens. They made the salad bowls. They learned metal spinning and made the skillets. Now they can make their own flatware? Yeah buddy, sign them up!

The Jay Lenos among us will be the other home users. They buy cars whose manufacturers went out of the car business 71 years ago today. There are cars from the fifties that won't run for lack of parts. If the Sunbeam Club or the Bricklin Club had downloadable part files, you could make your own carb floats.

And in industry, prototypes and tooling are natural uses.

But building a factory to print over hours what a hydraulic press can make in seconds? Not likely.