3-D printing is revolutionizing product development

• 3-D printing is finding its way into many industries%2C including auto
• So far%2C consumers and small businesses are embracing technology
• Bike helmets%2C ear buds%2C prosthetics are being produced

SAN FRANCISCO — When Ford Motor shows off the latest version of its hybrid car at an Atlanta auto show this month, its drive train and other key parts will be products of a new development process that's taken hold across Corporate America and the world.

Rather than using custom machine tools to build early prototypes of new parts, Ford is now using 3-D printing technology to design and test its engineers' latest ideas.The new method allows product developers to have a prototype in their hands in as little as a week after they create a new design — compared with a previous wait time of three to four months.

"We're building more and more parts every day using this process," says Harold Sears, a technical expert in rapid manufacturing at Ford's design facility in Dearborn, Mich.

Ford's new hybrid transmission was developed on a 3-D printer that costs about $300,000 and which can turn a pile of aluminum powder into a working prototype in a day or two.

"For any engineer using (prototype) models to develop, this is the way to do it," says Sears. "Most large companies are now doing things this way."

While low-cost 3-D printing by consumers and small businesses looks like a market now poised for takeoff, large businesses have already embraced advanced versions of the technology. The result has been a significant improvement in the product-development process across a wide range of industries, including the manufacturing of cars, consumer electronics, safety equipment and medical devices.

The process has done more than just save time and money, according to Sears and a half-dozen other engineers USA TODAY spoke with. They say rapid prototyping using 3-D printing is producing more innovative, higher-quality products — from custom-fitted bicycle helmets and prosthetics to better-sounding ear buds and loudspeakers.

"This has more than cut in half the time it takes to go from a crazy idea in someone's head to a part that's ready for production," says Charles Sprinkle, a systems engineer for Harman America, a Stamford, Conn.-based maker of loudspeakers.

Instead of waiting for tools and parts to come back from outside machine shops or injection-molding houses, product developers on tight deadlines now get more hands-on time to test their models. 3-D printers allow them to test and update more versions of their prototypes — in some cases tripling the number of iterations of a new product that can be refined before being mass-produced.

A BIG WELCOME MAT FROM THE BIG APPLE

As corporations have transformed their product development with high-end machines like those at Ford and Harmon, leading makers of 3-D printers, such as Stratasys of Eden Prairie, Minn., have developed midrange desktop models costing $30,000 to $50,000. As they look to address a wider market, new upstarts such as MakerBot and Type A have rolled out mass-market models priced at less than $2,500 — well within the reach of consumers and small businesses.

The proliferation of the technology is creating a growing industry based on 3-D printing, one that includes everything from businesses doing contract prototyping work to high-tech incubators teaching 3-D printing courses to individuals.

"As costs come down and (printing) speeds go up, the number of products is exploding," says Adam Ellsworth, CEO of San Francisco-based ProtoTank, a start-up that provides prototyping and custom design services.

Just as Nike used 3-D printing to develop the cleats for its latest athletic shoe, small entrepreneurs are using services like ProtoTank to design everything from glow-in-the-dark lab coats to signs that need neither neon gas nor electricity to glow.

Companies that target small business and consumer applications of 3-D printing are already attracting investors and other backers who see the technology as a future driver of economic growth.

This month, the New York City Investment Fund extended a loan to Shapeways, one of the leading companies providing 3-D printing and prototyping services to other businesses. The New York-based company, which was spun out of Dutch giant Royal Philips Electronics in 2007, has already received several rounds of funding from investors such as Union Square Ventures.

The $1.2 million loan is to be used by Shapeways to build a new facility in the Big Apple, says Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the New York City Partnership Fund.

"There's a lot of design expertise here, a lot of architecture firms," Gotsch says. "We think they're going to be early adopters of this technology" among small businesses. Gotsch believes that 3-D printing "is right on the cusp" of transitioning from a niche technology, used mainly by large corporations and hobbyists, into a mass market of consumers and small businesses.

"We see this as a growth area, and we want to attract and keep the economic activity and jobs it creates here in New York," she says.

THE MAKER ECONOMY

On the other side of the country, instructor Kyle Moore is teaching a 3-D printing class at the San Francisco location of TechShop, a technology incubator with offices in 10 U.S. cities. It's early on a Wednesday afternoon, and six of the eight workstations in the classroom are filled by people who each paid $60 for the class, which runs about two hours.

"Now, we hit 'M' for make," Moore tells the class, after prepping a software file that, if all goes well, will print out a plastic nut and bolt with threading precise enough to fit them together snugly.

As the students gather around to watch, a thin line of filament begins to be squeezed out of a so-called extruder head and onto a raised platform in the middle of the machine.

The innovative products that will someday come from these types of low-cost machines will be limited only by the human imagination, according to Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine whose non-fiction book, Makers, helped bring the growing 3-D printing economy to light last October.

Speaking to an audience of San Francisco's Commonwealth Club that same month, Anderson said the "maker revolution" spurred by 3-D prototyping will rival both the industrial revolution and the PC revolution in its impact on society. "The introduction of a digital manufacturing model to the general public means ... the democratization of technology," says Anderson, as individuals will soon be able to produce small numbers of products comparable to those made by large corporations.

He envisions a future with everything from custom body parts to "instant vaccines made by a DNA printer."

Yet the advance of a new technology isn't without setbacks, something discovered by the students in Moore's 3-D printing class at TechShop, which was founded by a onetime science adviser to the hit television show Mythbusters.

Soon after Moore started the print job that was supposed to become the nut and bolt, one student noticed that the first layer of plastic was misaligned with those layers that were extruded on top of it. Moore spent the next five to 10 minutes trying to scrape and pry the now-worthless piece of plastic off the Replicator 2's platform.

Clearly, the technology is still a work in progress.

"3-D printers have come a long way, but they still only work about 70% of the time," says Jesse Harrington, a former industrial designer who now works as a program manager and liaison to the 3-D maker community for Autodesk, the San Rafael, Calif.-based maker of design software.

The technology also has its limits because the so-called fused deposition modeling that 3-D printers use to create products in layers results in a structural integrity too weak for them to be used in production parts. (For example, while some gun enthusiasts are creating custom ammunition clips at home with 3-D printers, such magazines warp and fail after discharging just five or six bullets.)

"3-D printing isn't going to replace manufacturing of anything that's made with liquid metal poured into a mold, at least not yet," Harrington says. "Once you get over 100 (in quantity) 3-D printing isn't of much use today."

Still, the technology is truly revolutionary, he says, because "you don't need to have any machine skills to prototype."

Meanwhile, large companies continue to use 3-D prototyping to push the boundaries of innovation. In Northridge, Calif., engineers at Harman America's JBL unit used the process to develop a new type of loudspeaker component, called a waveguide, that produces better, more reliable sound.

"We can use software to predict how a part will perform, but that only takes us so far," says Derrick Rodgers, a JBL product engineer who's been prototyping with 3-D printing for about a decade. "Having a physical model to measure the acoustic performance of a new component lets us do things we couldn't do before," he says. "Actually, it's a bit like rocket science."

Among the earliest adopters of 3-D printing was Jabil Circuit, a contract manufacturer that helps design, develop and produce electronic products for a marquee list of technology companies, including Apple, Cisco Systems and IBM. Jabil has been using a 3-D printer to prototype products for about 15 years and now uses it for "almost anything we touch, from medical equipment to semiconductor equipment," says Gregory Jantsch, a mechanical engineering manager at the company's headquarters in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Most design-review meetings at Jabil revolve around prototypes produced on a 3-D printer that costs about $45,000, Jantsch says. "For engineers and designers, there's no substitute for a part you can touch or hold in your hands," he says.

Jabil makes everything from Hewlett-Packard laptops to BlackBerry smartphones, but Jantsch declined to say whether the company was using 3-D printing to help develop a new so-called "smart" wristwatch rumored to be in development at Apple and Samsung.

But when asked whether such a product will be made using rapid 3-D prototyping, Jantsch was sure it would. "There's no doubt in my mind," he says. "Anyone who doesn't develop this way will be left behind."