The supersizing of 3D printers

My father was a commercial artist. He designed newspaper ads, promotional fliers, and a humungous beer mural that once hung behind the bar at the Hamm’s Brewery tasting room in St. Paul, Minn.

When I was nine years old, he took me to the print shop that processed most of his work. I fell in love with that place—the sounds of the machinery, the inky smells.

Those now-antique printers are dead (although Dad’s still kicking, thankfully), replaced by faster, more capable, and simpler-to-use equipment. And as anyone reading this blog knows, printers are no longer limited to two dimensions.

Today’s 3D printers can produce incredibly complex workpieces that, in some ways, compare to my father’s works of art, albeit much thicker.

Printers are also getting larger. It’s like the additive manufacturing industry is taking cues from Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the 2004 documentary Super Size Me. Some of today’s AM equipment could re-create my dad’s Hamm’s beer mural, complete with a life-sized bear and functioning canoe.

Thermwood’s LSAM (Large Scale Additive Manufacturing) hybrid printer, for example, is being used to print Local Motors’ Olli, an autonomous vehicle. Lincoln Electric Additive Solutions recently introduced a large-format metal printer, a system comprised of a robot and wire-arc welding system that can build tractor-size tooling, molds, and prototypes. There’s also BigRep, which offers an FFF (fused filament fabrication)-style printer large enough to build desk chairs and bicycle frames, and Continuous Composites, whose CEO, Tyler Alvarado, described his company’s equipment in an article I wrote as “virtually unlimited in terms of the size of workpiece.”

There are others big AM systems, too, with more in the 3D-printer pipeline.

As you might recall, I wrote about the growing number of construction companies building tiny houses and more with automated “concrete poopers” (I love that term), possibly signaling an end to conventional building techniques.

I’ve also spoken with a company that has automated the composite layup process used to make commercial aircraft. Granted, it’s a far different technology than the powder bed and FFF technologies we’ve come to associate with AM, but it’s additive nonetheless, a technology able to build shapes large enough to fly in.

It might be a small world after all, but 3D printing is apparently making it much, much larger.

A Thermwood LSAM is being used to 3D-print Local Motors' autonomous vehicle Olli.