3D Printing Money
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Things have been largely the same since the industrial revolution took hold. If you want something, you can trade the money you get from your labor to buy something far more valuable than you would be able to make yourself with your bare hands. This goes from the shirt on your back to the car you drive to the salad tongs you use to serve yourself salad. Those products are proprietary and manufactured in central locations, packaged and shipped to you. This centralized manufacturing of proprietary products has dominated the economy since the industrial revolution because of economies of scale. No matter how good of a craftsman you are, it would still make since to buy even the humble salad tongs instead of say trying to carve them out of wood. Recently however, several studies have indicated potential of producing consumers digitally reproducing open source designs with 3D printing to save money by offsetting the purchase of commercial products. In this model the consumer simply finds the design they want on line, download it for free and then make it for themselves in the comfort of their own homes with 3D printing. This is even good for the environment,
With over 2 million desktop 3D printers being purchased per year, the impact on conventional industry could be substantial, but is still unknown. A recent study tried to begin to determine the economic impact created by proliferation of open-source digital designs for 3D printed products. In order to do this, the top 100 most popular designs posted on the YouMagine 3D printing repository are analyzed in a new study. YouMagine is repository with thousands of free designs and only one of many such repositories found all over the world.
The download substitution value was calculated based on Amazon prices of comparable products to estimate the potential savings those designs could generate for 3D printer users that made them for themselves.
Case studies are provided on three types of open source designs: i) open source equivalent products, ii) non-commercial products of high value to the consumer, and iii) products for 3-D printing users. The savings available for prosumers (producing consumers) was found to be highly dependent on the 3-D printing material. The means of percentage savings using commercial 3-D printing filament was 82%.
What if you want to slice your banana? There is a direct comparison of the open-source design and the commercial equivalent is shown below. As it is a hardware tool, the infill density is set to 100%, which requires 104 grams of filament. The cost to print this banana slicer is about $1, while the commercial equivalent costs $6 (we can optimistically assume you don’t need to pay shipping or taxes). The banana slicer saves prosumers more than 83% to fabricate it.
Bannana slicer (open source on the left and proprietary on right).
Joshua Pearce and Jun-Yu Qia (CC-By)
On the other end of the product cost spectrum consider the 3D printable glidecam, which has been downloaded 15,355 times at the time of the study. 40% infill density is recommended that results in approximately 500 grams of filament needed because the support required to print some of the components. Costs of additional materials like bolts, screws, aluminum tubes, etc. were added, which results in a total material cost of around $40. The cost of a commercial equivalent product is $224. Each prosumer that fabricated this saved over 80% from purchasing the commercial product and thus this open hardware design alone generated a savings in the prosuming community of more than $2.9 million. The comparison of the open source version and the commercial equivalent can be seen below.
Camera stabilizer (open source on left, proprietary on right).
Joshua Pearce and Jun-Yu Qia (CC-By)
This means that if the open source design already exists consumers get a whopping 80% discount on 3D printing the product themselves. If adoption of household-level DIY digital manufacturing of open source designs with 3D printing becomes widespread the impact on the economy could be substantial.
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