3D Manufacturing: New Weapon For US Economy

The year is 2017.

Nearly every one of the US's 120 million households has its own multicolor ³DC₃ printer with a C3 bath (a C₃H₆O finishing tank).

The President of the US officially announces a total end to consumer imports of plastic goods.

We are not buying iPhone 9 cases from Asia. Instead, Americans buy a one-time license of their favorite Starck design from the AppStore, and customize it further, as needed.

Admittedly this vision for 2017 takes some leaps of optimism. Anybody familiar with 3D printing has hoped for a version of such a future. Yet in 2014 we are not thinking seriously enough of how 3D printing, otherwise known as additive manufacturing, can bring such change to our economy -- because it can! If we are not thinking of ways to bring about US manufacturing independence with the aid of additive manufacturing, we are not thinking big enough.

Individual households making what they need is what I term "3D making." Let’s face it, even 120 million home-printers cannot make the US self-sufficient in plastic product manufacturing. For a macro-economic change on a national scale, "3D manufacturing" is the way to go. 

Making versus manufacturing
Three things are desperately needed from today’s 3D technology:

Effectively, we need to separate delightful, hobby-level, in-home making from economy-empowering manufacturing. Let’s look at a 3D manufacturing future: 

It is 12:30 p.m. on August 15, in the year 2020. People are busy shopping on a "dot-3d" website:

1. Katie has a new pink dress. She designs, in the exact same pink shade, a 14.5-ounce clear plastic water bottle (to fit the backpack pocket) with a pink lid and a pink lunchbox for two sandwiches -- exactly 14 cm x 28 cm x 1.8 cm.

2. Tim is growing fast, and his jeans (blue denim-with-maroon highlights) should fit perfectly if sized 26.25 inches x 30.5 inches.

3. Phil orders a wooden footstool for Granny made of New England red oak, to match her kitchen, at 11 inches high by 24 inches wide. On a whim, he adds a little floral design engraved just for dear old Nana.

4. Little Johnny's mother wants precisely nine purple stars on a yellow 50% polyester pillow case (easier to wash out his nighttime drool).

5. She adds a ceramic baking dish to the check-out cart with an olive green glaze, exactly the size that will fit the baking drawer and the oven. She needs a replica of Johnny's action figure for his ninth birthday's cake. Oh, never mind, she can just print that one at home.

All orders will be fulfilled today. They will be picked up at the automated Scan-D-Liver drive-through after work, on the way home.

This really can happen -- if we go the 3D manufacturing route. This is the path for a mass-customized economy, where we are no longer dependent on foreign imports -- leading to a renaissance of industry.

This brings us to the trillion-dollar question: "Why do we need this so desperately?"

The West led the Industrial Revolution until about the 1930s, when Asia joined in. Asia is still in the thick of it. During dozens of visits to China over the past 17 years, I have seen "cities" easily the size of the entire metropolitan area of a major American city that are entirely devoted to the manufacture and global sale of select product categories. Each region produces its own specialty. Other economies thunder ahead while our long-term productivity rate is dropping alarmingly (for more, see "America’s Lost Oomph" in The Economist). Our innovations in 3D Technologies are being watched closely by foreign economies. Worse still, the tech is being emulated before we implement it ourselves for large size and large-scale production. If we are not alert, we may not lead the 3D manufacturing economy.

What could we do to spur the growth of 3D manufacturing in the US?

Built on existing technologies, a single additive manufacturing machine serving about 2 million people becomes part of a manufacturing network of a hundred such machines across the country. The network becomes specialized for a select product category. In being fragmented, it can act as a factory in the cloud, with neural ends in every city, reacting to local needs. This is digitally distributed 3D manufacturing.

Here are some steps we could take in the immediate future: 

1. Hack materials. Not all materials fit into the current dominant approach to additive manufacturing, which is powdered-bonded-jettisoning. Nor can they all be melted from filaments. We need to get into the properties of materials and tweak their delivery mechanisms in order to decide how the material behaves and performs. This is the area my company is involved in, using additive manufacturing with wood. We have hacked this organic fibrous material to produce real, solid wood objects using a stratified additive manufacturing process. Not just footstools, but food platters, solid wood doors, picture frames, furniture, and much more can be produced off CAD design files.

2. Miniaturize our factory giants. Climbing a ladder using only hands is silly. We should use the huge foothold of knowledge available to us -- our existing factory base. Most processes of mass-production happening in giant centralized plants today can be miniaturized to work on smaller, albeit still industrial machines that need a few hundred square feet instead of a few acres. We can achieve this along with the "hack materials" approach just mentioned. This will require thoughtful application of physics, chemistry, and mechanics (which we already possess), but the payoff could truly be great.

3. Believe the math. Five hundred households could each buy a fine desktop machine, spending a total of $500,000. But how much return will that add to the economy or reduce imports? More valuable would be a $500,000 3D manufacturing machine (to mass-customize orders) that can produce high-quality goods for 2 million people and add anywhere between $3 million to $5 million in revenue.

Very simply, we need to hack more materials, build on our knowledge base, and make more macro capital investments.

By 2020, the US can hugely reduce imports, make locally, bring jobs back, use our raw material, produce goods to our standards, reduce inventory investment, customize everything, blow up the supply chain, minimize waste, have a greener system, and once again, be the manufacturing superpower we need to become.

3D making is all set to blossom into manufacturing. 3D manufacturing will bring the world to our doorstep.

Hear Samir Shah and other top speakers at Designers of Things, the new event in wearable tech, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things. It happens Sept. 23-24 in San Francisco. Register for Designers of Things with marketing code EBDOT and save.