Made 3D Printing Hot
R
ELEASED IN 2012, THE
MakerBot Replicator
sold for $1,749. For that
price, you could own
the first mass-mar-
ket, consumer-grade
3D printer. It’s the
equivalent of the first Home-
brew desktop computer or an
early laser printer in terms of
starting a revolution. This was
a tool that extended the reach
of the DIY maker community
and, because of its widespread
appeal and useful tech, broughtworked by heating a polymer to
about 400 degrees Fahrenheit,
then adding precise, pliable lay-
ers to form the object’s shape.
When the plastic cooled, it hard-
ened into a three-dimensional
object. The tech was an evolution
of Fused Deposition Molding,
which was invented by Scott
Crump in the ’80s (Crump is
now the director and chairman
of Stratasys, which owns Mak-
erBot), but the MakerBot made
the process faster, cheaper, and
easier—products could be fab-
ricated in hours, or sometimes
even minutes.
As MakerBot VP of Engi-
neering Dave Veisz explains,
the Replicator really does work
like a hot-glue gun—an extruder3D printing from sci-fi novelty
to the mainstream.
Before the Replicator, pro-
totypers used CNC (computer
numerical control) machines
that revealed an object by carv-
ing away the exterior. Or massive
stereolithography machines that
were complicated, expensive,
and larger than a refrigerator.
The Replicator, on the other
hand, was not much larger than
a milk crate and was easy for any-
one with a home computer to use.
Inside was what pundits at72 May/June 2020