Consumer Products
Consumer users of 3D printing technologies and 3D printed products were the last category to emerge. This category includes primarily adopters of consumer 3D printing technologies, as well as adopters of 3D printed products.
These are actually two very different targets for the AM industry. The first and most relevant category for the future of AM is made of regular consumers who purchase 3D printed products because these offer better characteristics than traditionally manufactured products. The second category is made of enthusiasts and hobbyists who have purchased a 3D printer as a garage tool to further explore the production of DIY products such as drones, miniature models, RC cars, robots or even the 3D printers themselves. This category, which also includes many from the maker movement, is focused primarily on the 3D printing process.
Consuming 3D printed products
Users of 3D printed products are only concerned with the products themselves and only very marginally with the processes necessary to make the. They are users of 3D printed products because these are better, more efficient, more customized products but they are not interested in how these products were actually made.
Typical 3D printed consumer products include eyewear frames and footwear products (insoles, midsoles, sandals), as well as sporting equipment and gear. These product categories all leverage 3D printing to offer improved customization and better performances through more efficient product geometries ensuring lightweight and better ergonomic properties.
3D printing has been used to both develop and produce a number of consumer sporting equipment products and parts. These include snowboarding bindings, goggles, ski boots, golf clubs, professional football helmets and several types of entire bicycles (and eBikes such as this one from Arevo) and bicycle parts. Carbon’s technology, in particular, is now being used to 3D print bike saddles, by fizik and Specialized among others.
Another typical consumer product segment using 3D printing at various levels is jewelry. In this case, 3D printing is primarily used for indirect production via lost wax casting manufacturing, enabling more advanced geometries with traditional materials. The next generation of jewelry products are using additive manufacturing as a direct manufacturing tool for polymers as well as ceramics and direct precious metal 3D printing.
Consuming the 3D printing process
This category of adopters was created when the RepRap movement made many of the technologies and processes necessary to build 3D printers available to everyone through open source sharing of information. Focusing primarily on filament extrusion and – in minor part – on DLP stereolithographic technologies, this movement led to a further, drastic reduction in the price of some 3D printers, taking it from the $5,000 professional and prosumer cost level to below $1,000 (with some systems running as low as $200).
Early RepRap adopters and developers often evolved their expertise thus creating a new business segment for affordable desktop 3D printers. This trend was – and continues to be – driven by the Maker movement, which is largely made up of amateur engineers and artists who have embraced digital manufacturing technologies and make things for the sake of making.
While in many cases this passion for making leads to failures or products that prove to be useless on unattainable, there is no doubt that the maker movement and amateur 3D printing adoption has been instrumental in raising global awareness around the use of these technologies, proving much more effective – to this day – than initiative promoted by governments and large corporations.
Latest consumer 3D printing news:
-
An Duong (MoreThan3D) publishes 1/48 scale 3D printed Starship model
An Duong is a Rolls Royce aerospace engineer and a great fan of SpaceX. On top of a great talent for designing 3D printable parts, he has a real passion for sharing 3D printing knowledge, awareness and educational projects. As a hobby, to both build on these passions and support…
Read More -
A cobbler in the machine: voxeljet’s Coral Runner
In 1827, The Book of English Trades summarized the cobbler’s profession: “There are few trades more useful than that of a shoe-maker, and, perhaps, not many that are more profitable, when it is carried on to a considerable extent.” We have largely forgotten this profession as, two hundred years on, the…
Read More -
Aectual beta launches global design-to-delivery platform for 3D printed AEC products
Since its founding in 2017, Dutch company Aectual has taken the tenets of 3D printing—including customization, design freedom and sustainability—to heart, applying them to the areas of architecture and interior design. Many of our readers will be familiar with the company: in 2018, it gained notice for 3D printing a…
Read More -
New 4D Fusio model from Adidas confirms 3D printed midsoles are here to stay
In spite of all the doubts about pricing and workflow, in spite of tough competition from Asian footwear manufacturers, adidas’ idea to bet on Carbon’s technology for footwear midsoles continues to pay off. Pricepoints for some models have dropped below $150 and new models keep coming out, such as the…
Read More -
How Imaginarium used 3D printing to help create a Guinness world record diamond ring
Imaginarium, a large 3D printing service provider in India, supported Kotti Srikanth in his quest to achieve a Guinness World Record for the most diamonds set in one ring. Kotti Srikanth, owner of the Diamond Store by Chandubhai, a unit of Hallmark Jewellers, in Hyderabad, set ou to break the…
Read More -
Superstrata ships first composite 3D printed bike
Superstrata, the company founded by Arevo Labs to commercialize composite 3D printed bikes and e-bikes, has shipped the first Superstrata bike. The bike marks a significant milestone as it represents one of the very first continuous fiber-reinforced composites 3D printed consumer products ever to hit the market. As such it…
Read More -
A Massivit 3D acceleration to adopting 3D printing in construction
The introduction of 3D printing – in any form – into the construction industry is among the most fascinating and, at the same time, challenging endeavor. On the one hand, the most advanced and technologically complex, digital manufacturing processes; on the other an industry that has notoriously been slow to…
Read More -
Viktor&Rolf Flowerbomb is latest perfume brand to 3D print exclusive bottle
A new collaboration between ERPRO Group, VIKTOR&ROLF, and L’Oréal is using Carbon‘s Digital Light Synthesis technology to produce an exclusive 3D printed bottle for the Flowerbomb perfume. When working on the Flowerbomb fragrance, Viktor&Rolf wanted to create something new. They dreamt of. a fragrance that had the power to spread…
Read More -
Over 50,000 ophthalmic lenses 3D printed on Luxexcel VisionPlatform
Luxexcel‘s VisionPlatform systems installed in the US and Europe have printed over 50,000 lenses for customers in the traditional and smart eyewear, and high-tech industries. The Dutch company is the leading technology provider for 3D printed prescription lenses. “Our VisionPlatforms offer customers the ability to 3D print lenses, and we’ve…
Read More -
Impact F1, what next-gen, parametric, 3D printed flip flops look like
The ability to leverage parametric online customization tools to create and personalize entire products is embedded in the potential of 3D printing as a production technology. Until now this potential has been only marginally exploited but the possibilities are rapidly increasing: more optimized products, more customized, more innovative, more sustainable:…
Read More