Editorials / Opinions

2021 is really shaping up to be the year of the application, capitalization, and consolidation. Many companies are being bought to facilitate market entry by new players. We are also…

Olaf Diegel, Professor of Additive Manufacturing at the University of Auckland, is well known for his 3D printed guitars. He and his students conduct many more experiments and projects, however….

In my Brittle Spear series, I wrote of how the tip of technology’s spear grows ever sharper but more brittle. One of the things I mentioned was that the Cubans…

The high-touch, high-quality 3D printing service is under threat. With OEMs starting huge services, polymer companies getting into the service game, and giant manufacturing firms looking to be the biggest…

Flow is not an industry; it’s not an established vertical; it’s not an established part; it’s not a thing you can buy at Sigma Aldrich or RS Components. Flow is…

Desktop 3D printing was supposed to be the next big thing. Due to over-claim and a response from the media that was far too enthusiastic, we were propelled to fill…

For years people have been speculating when or if 3D scanning will come to mobile phones. Apple’s acquisition of several 3D scanning companies and Google’s Project Tango fueled endless discussions. But,…

Belgian 3D printing service and software company Materialise (MTLS) has just purchased the remainder of RSscan and RSPrint, including the Phits personalized insole business, for €8.2 million. Here I’ll briefly…

In the molded, mass-manufactured, and CNC’d world, everything was smooth. Meanwhile, our 3D printed world had a surface roughness problem that was proving difficult to solve. Finishing took longer than…

Green begets green. If we want to save the planet, then we should make it profitable to do so. That sadly is the only real path to implementing genuinely global…

With 3D printing making inroads in personal protection equipment (PPE) during the current crisis, what are the long term prospects of 3D printed safety gear? One would expect them to…

Just to be perfectly clear: from a pure art perspective, I think readymades were a horrible mistake, a distraction, a wrong turn. Duchamp’s Fountain was not one to throw coins…

In this series, previously we looked at how we’re creating a system designed to spit out less able things and that these things may be better but will be less…

Golf company TaylorMade extensively used Formlabs machines to prototype a better golf club. The company’s work illustrates a few key emerging trends: that desktop machines could partially displace services, that…

Roman spears were often brittle by design (perhaps). Sharp, tough spears were useful, but had the disadvantage that the weapon you threw at the enemy could be picked up and…

SmarTech Analysis has recently published its Q1 2020 additive manufacturing market guidance for the metal additive manufacturing industry, highlighting the first quarter in an economic universe gripped by effects of…

A year ago, if you would have asked anyone in our industry what they thought might be a future killer application, it’s highly doubtful that anyone would have replied with,…

Stratasys, the marketplace leader in industrial fused deposition modeling technology, has announced that it is laying off 10 percent of its workers worldwide. In a statement, the company seemed to…

We must be mindful that just because we can make a design that this design is not necessarily the right one. While I’m buoyed by the 3D printing industry’s efforts…

Around five weeks ago I made a decision for us to not write at all about Covid-19/Corona Virus. I had seen the fear on the sunken faces of friends and…

A friend took a broken part of his old boat out of his pocket.  “Can you fix this?” he asked me. It was a complicated aluminium die-casting from the cold…

The industrial revolution saw the advent of mass manufacturing. The assembly line and the hourly wage worker invented, splitting up products into parts made through a series of repetitive serial…

In this article, I detail an interesting movement that is occurring within Europe through the collective Fab City.

In this article, I detail my brief visit to Machines Room and how it is closing down. This does not deter the essence of making though. There are interesting things occurring that will lead to future social change within London maker culture.