Can you really print that?

The use of 3-D printers is exploding all over the world as people create anything and everything from machine parts to elaborate edible designs.

Sweet geometry - Sugar decorations printed by the 3D Systems Chefjet 3D printer which makes 3D edible decorations

It was a shot that echoed around the world. When a group called Defense Distributed last year made available its blueprint for a plastic handgun called the Liberator that could be made by anyone at home using a commercially-available 3-D printer, two things immediately happened.

One hundred thousand people downloaded it, prompting police everywhere to warn it was a diabolical act sure to encourage more crime and terrorism. And just about everyone else asked: what the heck is a 3-D printer – and what else can you make with one?

But maybe the better question is, what can’t you build? In Amsterdam there are plans for a 3D-printed canal house, while Chinese company WinSun New Materials is reported to be using printers to make a village out of a mix of cement and industrial waste. That plastic gun has been followed by a metal gun.

For better or worse, the limits, perhaps, are only restricted to the imagination. And one big advantage is, there is very little waste of precious materials.

Here in Adelaide I’m in a laboratory to see this brave new world in action. We’re in a lab in the Adelaide College of the Arts where a small wooden box sits on the bench making a lot of whirring sounds. Inside a nozzle is spurting out line after line of melted plastic in neat circuits. No guns here though. We’re getting our own tiny plastic 3-D cat. But, says Karen Marsh who is showing me how the 3-D printers work, we should be excited about it. “It’s moving so fast this technology, unless you are looking at every single article that comes out and every announcement you quickly get stale,” she says.

Marsh set up FabLab as a kind of 3-D printing incubator in 2012. She’d discovered FabLabs rolling out internationally from the United States, demonstration zones dedicated to showing the world how 3-D printing works and to fostering new ideas and collaboration – and she was determined to be a part of it.

“There’s now 135 FabLabs across the world last time I looked but they are rapidly spreading,” she says. Her own lab and its array of 3-D printers are now busily teaching South Australians about this new technology. The lab has printed echidna bones for the SA Museum and human bones for radiologists. It is also helping to launch a new wave of entrepreneurs. More about them later.

So why is a concept that has been around since the 1980s capturing everyone’s imagination? In some ways, it is the same story as motor cars, microwaves and flat screen TVs. Cost. The 3-D printer has now arrived for household use.

Printers that once cost $20,000 have fallen so far down the cost curve that Officeworks at Mile End started selling the Cube 3-D printer for $1499 in January.

Their arrival is being heralded as a turning point – where the factory production line moves back into the home.

Not surprisingly, Officeworks business manager of technology Toby Watson thinks they are the next household must. “We anticipated it was going to be the next big thing in Australia based around our team’s ongoing trends research,” Watson says.

“The in-store and online sales of the Cube 3-D printers at Officeworks have definitely exceeded expectations. We anticipated there was going to be an appetite for such technology, but Australians have spoken loud and clear with their wallets and positive banter on our social media channels.”

The cube printers read a digital file and print small 3-D plastic items. They are at the lower end in quality but they are affordable. And it is this that Adelaide-based Prescott Securities chief economist Darryl Gobbett thinks marks the beginning of an explosion in their use – similar to the way computers and flat screen televisions became common place once their prices fell.

Gobbett has been keenly watching the 3-D space for some time.

He predicts a world in the near future where households can pump out plastic toys, sunglasses, hinges, mobile phone covers or chess pieces – and, as consumers take up the new technology, the quest to improve quality is likely to surge.

“In the very near future, consumers won’t be able to live without it – but already businesses can’t afford to ignore it,” Gobbett says.

He warns companies to start planning for the onslaught because “those taking too long to adapt or who put their head in the sand in favour of the status quo will be overtaken and left for dead”.

There are all sorts of 3-D printers out there – from the smaller household variety that can print files from free websites like Thingiverse over a couple of hours to the far more expensive versions that can print in titanium or concrete.

High end printers are being used by Adidas as it experiments with 3-D printing metal cleats for its sports shoes. Nike is taking its work a step further and printing an entire shoe. Defence companies are printing jet engine parts and guns, and the British Department of Defence is using 3-D printers to repair and maintain weapons in the field.

At GE in the United States, 3-D printing machines are making parts ranging from a plastic fabric softener dispenser for a washing machine to grates for gas ranges.

The company claims the printers are significantly reducing costs.

Instead of having to make up to 20 new individual prototypes whenever a new design needs tweaking, the changes can now all be made on a digital file.

In Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) uses one of the nation’s most expensive printers, estimated to be worth about a million dollars, to print in titanium.

Its work with the machine focuses on Australia’s unique position in producing more titanium ore than the rest of the world – but at current rates of production, it is likely to be depleted in 90 years.

The CSIRO’s quest is to “extend use of the resource for up to 9000 years” by finding new ways to convert ore into metal, and metal into manufactured items.

One of its projects saw scientists scanning a horse’s hooves then use 3-D modelling software to design the perfect fitting, lightweight racing shoe. Four customised titanium shoes worth about $600 were printed within a few hours.

“3-D printing a race horseshoe from titanium is a first for scientists and demonstrates the range of applications the technology can be used for,” John Barnes, Titanium Technologies Theme Leader, CSIRO Future Manufacturing Flagship, declares.

Back in Adelaide, Gobbet wants more South Australians grasping these opportunities to build new high end industries for our other raw materials that are currently sent overseas for processing where the labour costs are lower. He believes it could help win back manufacturing jobs lost at factories like Holden.

A recent visit to the optometrist has him pondering a future where in-store technology could scans clients’ faces and then print customised glasses and lenses while customers wait.

At the moment, it is a weeks-long wait while glasses are made overseas.

For 3-D printing fan Jake Henderson, it’s always been about being part of a bold new world rather than making pots of money. The Melbourne-born IT devotee ended up in Adelaide after spending “the last $1000 to my name” on an air ticket to a New Zealand 3-D printing conference in 2012.

His plan was to meet those working in the industry and talk himself into a job.

As luck would have it, Henderson met Karen Marsh just after she had won funding to set up FabLab in Adelaide. This community inventors’ workshop gives creatives, entrepreneurs and educational institutions access to 3-D printers and is managed by the Australian Network for Art and Technology. Both Henderson and Marsh are working to make FabLab an incubator for new ideas.

“On the 3rd of February last year President Obama said in the United States that it will revolutionise how we make things,” Henderson says with enthusiasm.

It has developed connections with startups such as 3DPrinterGear in the Riverland and 3D Prototypes and Models run by Daniel Brown in Adelaide.

Jamie Wilson set up 3DPrinterGear in Waikerie two years ago. He sells 3-D printers, plastic filament for 3-D printers in 1kg rolls of 1.75mm line, and also prints products from digital files.

Wilson saw the potential when 3-D printing boomed after some patents expired a few years ago and designers were free to start building new machines.

“It started in a kit system and the first thing they started doing with the new printers was to print parts for more printers,” Wilson says.

“My background is horticulture… but I have a personal interest in technology and I saw this as something to jump on board with. I could see it was going to become very popular.”

The business launched with a couple of orders, increasing to about 100 a month within six months and is now continually growing. This month, one of Wilson’s friends in the US sent a digital file asking him to print some drum kit cymbal parts and post them to an Australian customer, cutting out expensive and time consuming shipping costs.

3-D printing can also reduce a product’s environmental footprint by using less material. When an item is 3-D printed it adds only the amount of material needed, rather than the current manufacturing approach of subtracting a product from a larger piece of material and throwing away the leftovers.

Back at FabLab in the Adelaide College of the Arts, Gavin Smith and Will Tamblyn are among those pushing the 3-D printing limits into a new realm. The two are bringing Star Wars-like technology to life with their voxiebox invention.

Inside a clear, Perspex box thousands of tiny light beams are “printed” in layers to form a 3-D holographic image of a person or a spider or a chess piece. If you’ve seen R2D2 project the hologram of a pleading Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie, you get the picture.

Smith, who has a degree in engineering and a masters in IT, says the voxiebox can now create 3-D light images of skeletons, world maps and moveable chess pieces.

The plan is to target the gaming world and they’ve been spruiking their invention at the world’s largest gaming conference in San Francisco.

Smith too says 3-D printing is “going bananas right now because of the fact that you can buy a 3-D printer now for the price of a television set”.

The two came up with their own idea after a Thursday night lab session – held in their garden sheds where it “was an excuse to make silly stuff and drink beer”.

After a failed project they wondered what to do next and one suggested making a holographic projector. “We said that’s impossible, they don’t exist. How about we try and make it?” Tamblyn says.

“Now we just want to get it out there so nerds all over the world can rejoice.”