3d Printing - Bigger than internet - Closed captioned

3d printing is a new technology which promises to transform manufacturing in the next decade. It's a way to produce complicated shapes in a highly personalized way, in industries ranging from aerospace to medical equipment. Probably its most prominent proponent is Abe "Abraham" Reichental a former israeli air force technician who's now chief executive of U.S. based 3D Systems, one of the biggest makers of 3d printing machines. Personally, I believe that it's the next big thing, i think that it could be as big as the steam engine was in its day, as big as the computer was in its day, as big as the internet was in its day and I believe that this is the next disruptive technology that's going to change everything, it's going to change how we learn, its going to change how we create and its going to change how we manufacture. Mr. Reichental has just launched what he says is the first truly mass market 3d printer called the cube. It sells for about one thousand three hundred dollars and is targeted for use in schools and in the home. Tell us what this machine is doing and how it's doing it. Ok, Peter so this is our ah new cube 3d printer and what it does is it can take any digital design. slice it into thin layers and feed each layer through the cartridge into the melted filament and deposit it on top of itself one point at a time, to print in this case a beautiful napkin ring holder. How long would that take to really make the whole thing? Ok, so to print something like this at home ah if you printed this particular napkin holder would be about two-and-a-half hours, if you printed this cute rook with all of its interesting details and the spiral staircase on the inside, this would be about forty-five minutes. It's also very affordable, here we look at something that would cost you to print at home about three dollars and fifty cents, i don't think you could buy something like this for three dollars and fifty cents in a toy store. However the uses of the technology go a lot further then small simple toys. There are thousands of companies around the world that successfully adopted for the 3d printing, first and foremost, for design prototyping and testing, and more recently there are hundreds of examples of actually moving it onto the manufacturing floor, so whether its the F-18 that flies every day with some ninety parts printed on it, whether it's all the hearing aid companies that are benefiting from it, whether it's high end automobiles that now have some printed parts installed in them, 3d printing is becoming recognized as flexible and viable manufacturing technology. At the moment however the technology still has limitations in terms of where its used, while many thousands of different parts have been made with 3d printing only a handful have been put into to use where they have to withstand heavy stresses such as in the car gearbox. You know are we ready to print directly parts that will go into a jet engine? Not so much, but can we print the patterns that would then go into investment casting for potentially future jet engines? You bet, and so a lot of what we do today, and the way that where we have seen a significant increase in the adoption of 3d printing for manufacturing purposes, is many times in the final indirect step in printing sacrificial patterns that then go into investment casting, or into precious metal casting, or into medical casting. Mr. Reichental believes that annual sales of 3d printing machines will go up from about half a billion dollars now to around thirty five billion dollars in the next ten years, while this seems a bit optimistic to many observers of whats still a fledgling business, it would appear that 3d printing does have the power to make all sorts of parts less expensively, more quickly, and in a less environmentally harmful manner, and so change the landscape of a wide range of industries. This is Peter Marsh, with financial times,