Print your own book
Photograph by Jamie Rector for The New York Times
“The machine made a turtle, top, and Gumby, from a plastic powder.”
Print your own book. Not just the pages, but the whole thing. When I was reading this story this morning in The New York Times about 3-D printers edging closer to becoming household items, my mind started whirring about the possibility for the components for my snap-together books being printed out right at home. There’d be nothing to ship. I’m curious about the powdered plastic that forms the 3-D objects.
“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”
Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals. …
In a brainstorming session, Kevin Hickerson, an IdeaLab engineer, proposed the method the company would ultimately choose. First the machine spreads a powdered plastic over a roller, which is heated to just below the plastic’s melting point. Then a sharply focused beam of light melts dots of plastic on the roller. After the unmelted powder is brushed off, the roller deposits the hot plastic onto a platform. This process is repeated until the object is assembled from the bottom up.
I’ve used various 3d printers, and I’ll tell you – they’re not for book-printing. They’re good for simple devices or parts of a device, mainly for prototypes. Some you can use to test the fit of two parts, like in a ball-and-socket joint, but printing a book wouldn’t work on any of them – the pages would adhere together, and even if one of them could be opened it would crack.
It would be a great use for a rapid prototype machine, though, if it worked. A better use, though, would be to 3d print an Ebook reader – then you save environmental as well as shipping costs.
Rich Baldwin
January 27, 2008 at 1:17 pm