the printing press one of the greatest inventions of all time allowed for easy
and Rapid printing of books and information which spread literacy and
knowledge across the world the printing press revolutionized the spread of
information but now a new method of printing called 3D printing is poised to
revolutionize manufacturing the way it works is actually very simple using a 3D
model as a guide a moving 3D printer head lays down a layer of material that
has a certain amount of thickness to it then it does it again and again putting
down one layer at a time until finally the completed model has been created
literally from the ground up one slice at a time any complex object that cannot
support its own weight during printing is printed along with some kind of
scaffolding which can be easily removed or washed away once the object is
completely printed 3D printing can be done with all sorts of materials
different kinds of plastic metal Sandstone ceramic concrete wood and more
and here is an example this is a Lego Technic comp ible 32 to gear you see I
like to build robots in my spare time and while I have a lot of parts there
are some very useful pieces that simply don't exist so 3D printing to the rescue
once I knew what I wanted to make I needed to decide on some 3D modeling
software to use there are a ton of options but I ended up using Google
SketchUp which is easy to learn and use for a really powerful 3D program I would
recommend blender but it does have a very steep learning curve once I
finished making my 3D mod model I needed to figure out how I was going to print
it you can buy or even build your own 3D printer but because the technology is
still pretty new it's probably more worthwhile for most people to use a 3D
printing service coincidentally as I was writing this episode a company called
shapeways contacted us and offered to do some 3D printing for us I agreed and
uploaded my exported STL files to their server I chose which pieces colors and
what kind of material I wanted I went with strong and flexible plastic I was
also pretty surprised to see that they can print in 14 karat gold that is one
expensive gear a few weeks later I got a package in the mail containing all of my
pieces as you can see the plastic is a lot different from real Lego it's rough
and kind of chalky unless you get the polished stuff a lot of the pieces I
designed are a bit too tight but they still fit with real Lego overall I'm
very pleased with the results and I'll probably continue to design and print
more pieces in the future if you'd like to print any of the pieces I've designed
you can follow the link in the video description but being able to print
little plastic gears is just the beginning for 3D printing imagine 3D
printing an entire product from scratch does that remind you of anything you
know like the replicators from Star Trek perhaps computer te Earl gry
hot there you go okay so we probably
won't be able to print out a new toaster or a cup of tea anytime soon but it's
already possible to 3D print custom Prosthetics clothing food jewelry guns
drugs even living skin cartilage and Bone scientists are currently working on
ways to print entire organs like kidneys and livers and even with 3D printing in
its infancy there are already many legal concerns about what people can do with
3D printing technology easy homade weapon manufacturing and patent and
copyright infringement among them keep an eye on this because it's going to be
an interesting couple of decades something else to keep your eyes on
shutterstock.com I actually made a special request to do this ad into ation
because as a video editor I have a lot of very relevant things to say about
them I've been using Shutterstock for the past 3 months and I love it we make
a ton of videos at Lin's Media Group and before we got Shutterstock it was always
such a pain to get usable images of things that I needed I can't use Google
Images because most of those aren't licensed for reuse and they're usually
too small anyway Shutterstock is great because they have more than 35 million
images all of them carefully labeled and easily searchable and you don't even
need an account to see what they have to offer also a lot of the images have
their subjects isolated on a white background which is perfect for
compositing in Photoshop or elsewhere and most images are available in
enormous resolutions which is very useful for video and image creation
whatever your project might be Shutterstock has lots of different plans
to suit your unique image needs so if you'd like to go check them out go to
shutterstock.com and use the offer code Techquickie 514 when you order to
receive 20% off thanks for watching watching this episode of fast as
possible give us a like or a dislike if that's how you feel and leave a comment
about what you want to 3D print and also any future topics you'd like me to cover
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