Video: Ford Gives MakerBot 3D Printers to its Engineering Staff
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American car manufacturer Ford is embracing 3D printing.
According to GigaOm, Ford is planning to give a MakerBot 3D printer to every engineer in the coming months. Reminiscent of the computer revolution, computer workstations were first provided to professionals and later adopted by the general public.
In the video below, Ford engineer Zac Nelson shows how he uses 3D printers for rapid prototyping.
via GigaOm.
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Ford is ahead of the game but I’m unsure what car components could be built using FDM – even roughly… would have been better with a high-end group printer in my opinion.
Jon
Founder of CNCKing.com
Jon- Interesting point. Do you see limitations of prototyping using FDM?
With experience with FDM, STL and Polyjet, among other more traditional technologies, on projects ranging from one to millions copies, yes, there are limitations in all of these technologies. In lifetime I do not expect any new technology being able to reproduce all – or even many – manufacturing methods in one, simple process.
As explained in the video, FDM is good enough to evolve an new shift knob design, but you may not want to use that in your 30k$ car, e.g. it may fail in cold or hot environments. It is also obvious that FDM can’t do engine parts, it will not help much for the windshield or the electronics.
Many, but most of them only for early prototypes. The better but way more costly choice would be the new Objet 1000 due to the size, still with limitations when it comes to real cars.
I guess that the idea behind this program is to boost the creativity of their engineers, as like as Google allows their employees to spend 10% of their time on private projects.