Kick the tyres

A constant theme in my blogging has been kicking the tyres of new technology.  The analogy is not brilliant because though the phrase tends to be interpreted as giving a new technology or system a stress test to see how well it copes in real world conditions, kicking the tyres is a useless investigative factor in buying a car.

You can see I have been 'kicking the tyres' of my new 3D printer.  I can now go from switch on to start printing in about 5 minutes now which is pretty good, but if it was a photocopier, it would be wearing an axe by now with start rates that slow.

I showed the printer to a friend who was initially impressed and then said, 'when there's one with cartridges that works as quickly and smoothly as a printer, It'll be worth buying one'.  I think that's missing the point.  I believe it is unlikely the vast majority will ever have 3D printers in their homes because most of what we want to create uses diverse technologies and materials to manufacturing tolerances that would be very hard to replicate in the home economically compared to just buying a mass produced version.

Perhaps what we need is a new material.  As I said to a class one day, 'If we hadn't found wood was such an excellent all round building material, we would have had to invent it'.  Maybe that's the missing link, a material that's easy and VERY quick to 3D 'print', robust, cheap and can substitute for the endless plastic metal and glass parts that make up much of what we consume.  Or as Scottie would have put it 'Transparent Aluminium, Now there's a thing...'