3D printing

But don't print out a plastic gun - it will explode when you try to fire it.

I caught a quick glimpse of someone printing some kind of food on tv a few days ago!

Just remembered, it was a raspberry (more like jelly).

Is it just me but when I hear of amazing inventions like this, I immediately check the date ---- is it April 1 st ?

I wonder if they will be able to replace my aorta this way when it needs doing.

With any luck, durhamjen. A customised aorta - that would be something.

No it is not a hoax besottedgran it is as revolutionary as --- the silicon chip or the light bulb.

besottedgran I believe - but don't blame me if I am wrong - that this is how it works.

Just as a standard printer goes from side to side across the paper, putting little ink dots to form the letters and pictures, the 3D printer goes from side to side horizontally in a container of plastic powder, firing dots from a laser (or some such thing) to melt it together where the thing it is making is, but not where the gaps are. Then it moves up a tiny bit and does another layer. The computer has the blueprints for each layer. By the time it gets to the top, it has fixed together all the layers to make the 3D Thing.

Don't ask me what happens to the loose plastic powder that was outside the shape. It must fall off when the Thing is taken out, but what if there is a cavity? The spare powder would be sealed in for ever. Maybe the Thing has to be designed so as to not have any cavities.

Hope not, Elegran. That would be a problem for my aorta!

A tube with a hole at each end would be OK.

Thank you for explanation, Elegran. !!

Oh I know these innovations are not hoaxes, JessM -- it's just that some seem so fantastical that I find myself wondering if it's April Fool's Day!

Mind you I still haven't got my head around how something as large and heavy as a plane stays up there !!

Thanks from me elegran because as in my OP - it does seem like magic. But science so often defies what we intuitively think is impossible. Trouble is 200 years ago you could teach a bright girl everything that was known in physics, chemistry and biology in a few weeks. Now the amount of knowledge and the complication of that knowledge has expanded many thousand-fold.
WE take things for granted but if there was a mega-disaster and the human race cast back to the stone-age - how long would it take to re discover the mobile phone. They would have been very science fiction when we were growing up.

Yes, JessM, there are so many "magic" devices around to depend on that people forget how to do the simple things - find water and make it clean enough to drink, build a shelter that drains the rain off, dig a latrine downstream from your water supply, make a fire and keep it smouldering all night.

That is before they start on the basic construction and production needed for community living.

Personally I would buy a 3D printer, print myself a 3D printer and then take the original back for a refund

And print yourself several more to sell on.

3D guns ?
www.newscientist.com/article/dn25666-uk-government-tried-3dprinting-guns-to-assess-threat.html#.U46ilxa4lSV

As with much revolutionary technology, it can bring benefits and risks.

. . .and there is now a better method . . .http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31918215

I am awe struck when you see the houses and buildings created from 3d printing. China has really gone to town on it's innovation , amazing!

The potential is enormous if the costings can be viable.

JessM I have to agree. Ever since they first came out I have been almost standing on my head in an effort to work out just what the magic is. I have very poor special ability (I like to think other good things balance that out ) and I can only think that the geeks clever scientists who design both the printers and the designs for them have a very different brain to me. Thank heavens they do, of course, with people like me we would probably have a reasonably literate, quite artistic dying human race.

!!! spatial not special although I like to think my abilities are