That’s what we wrote back in 2016 on the first page of the first edition. That year seemed like a pie-in-the-
sky utopia of skyrocketing 3D printing stocks, new 3D business companies popping up overnight, an endless
wave of 3D printing crowdfunding campaigns, and the promise of a 3D printer in every home.
Those things may still come to pass, but the media’s interest in consumer 3D printing has waned while the
usefulness of the technology in education and business has soared.
It is an adage that many new technologies follow a cycle of rapid interest (“hype”) followed by the realiza-
tion of what the technology can actually do (the “reality”). 3D Printing is in the Plateau of Productivity phase
(Figure F-1) where real-world benefits are at an acceptable level of reliability and quality to be accepted by
businesses for ongoing utilization (reduced risk of adoption). The prevalence of the technology accelerates
rapidly as a result. The real advancements happen, perhaps without the fanfare, but with all the substance.
FOREWORD: AN INTRODUCTION
TO 3D PRINTING
“Feel fortunate! You are living at a time when technology is helping people become
masters of their environments. A 3D printer puts the power of a manufacturing
plant on your desk and opens worlds of opportunities that you (and the rest of humanity)
have never experienced before.”
FIGURE F1: Hype Cycle, credit Jeremy Kemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The current examples of how 3D printing has and will continue to transform medicine, construction, edu-
cation, and many other industries are the new stories. And educators have a special place in this moment:
they are educating the future entrepreneurs, engineers, and researchers of tomorrow who will be using 3D
printers to create viable human organs, colonize Mars, and who knows what else!
You will learn about the new 3D printing landscape that has emerged. One that has less hype, but more
utility. One that focuses less on media attention and more on actual advancements in materials, printer
technology, and use cases.
In this book we will explore the real-life use cases of 3D printing, how to manage a 3D printer yourself (with
a visual troubleshooting guide), how you can incorporate 3D printing at home and the classroom, and a new
chapter on how you can use 3D printing for your business.
FIGURE F1: Hype Cycle, credit Jeremy Kemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
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A VERY, VERY BRIEF INTRO TO 3D PRINTING:
Industrial 3D printing has been around since the 1980s. The technology became available to hobbyists and
consumers in 2009 when the RepRap Project brought together thinkers and coders from around the world
to create freely open plans and software. This gave anyone the ability to build a personal 3D printer, such as
the example shown in Figure F-2.
Fast-forwarding to today, the 3D printing industry (industrial and consumer combined) is now estimated at
around $17.8 billion and is expected to be $23.9 billion in 2022 and $35.6 billion in 2024. In the first edition of
this book, published in 2016, we cited the global 3D printing market was around $6-$7 billion; that’s a lot of
growth in 4 years! No one has a crystal ball to know the future, but it seems certain to us that 3D printing
will increasingly affect the way we as a society design and manufacture physical items.
HOW 3D PRINTERS WORK
Now let’s dive into the details. The most common type of 3D printing is known as “additive manufacturing” in
which small amounts of material are slowly built up into an object. The primary method of this is called FDM
(fused deposition modeling) or sometimes FFF (fused filament fabrication). FDM printers create objects by
building up material layer by layer over time. A thin strand of filament feeds into a part of the machine called
an extruder, which melts the plastic at a high temperature—typically around 200°C. There are many other
methods of 3D printing that this book will cover in later chapters, and they all work in the same “additive”
way. They bind, melt, or photo-polymerize (liquid resin which is hardened with UV light) material together to
create physical geometry.
The FDM process is very similar to using a hot glue gun. You probably have one at home and have used it for
craft or school projects. When you squeeze the handle of a hot glue gun, the solid glue is pressed against a
heating element and soft, spaghetti-like strands of molten glue extrude from the nozzle. Imagine swirling
those strands around and around on top of each other, forming circles that build up into a tube. As the glue
cools, it hardens, and a tube is created.
Following the glue gun analogy, in a 3D printer a thin strand of melted plastic is programmed to deposit
down, layer by layer, on a flat surface known as the build plate, where it cools and hardens into an object.
The 3D printer knows precisely where to trace each layer through instructions in a digital file sent from a
computer. The image in Figure F-3 provides a closer look at how this technology works.
Most consumer 3D printers use FDM technology and have a large spool of coiled plastic called filament
attached to them.
FIGURE F2: An early example of a person assembling a 3D printer from a kit.
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A VERY, VERY BRIEF INTRO TO 3D PRINTING:
Industrial 3D printing has been around since the 1980s. The technology became available to hobbyists and
consumers in 2009 when the RepRap Project brought together thinkers and coders from around the world
to create freely open plans and software. This gave anyone the ability to build a personal 3D printer, such as
the example shown in Figure F-2.
Fast-forwarding to today, the 3D printing industry (industrial and consumer combined) is now estimated at
around $17.8 billion and is expected to be $23.9 billion in 2022 and $35.6 billion in 2024. In the first edition of
this book, published in 2016, we cited the global 3D printing market was around $6-$7 billion; that’s a lot of
growth in 4 years! No one has a crystal ball to know the future, but it seems certain to us that 3D printing
will increasingly affect the way we as a society design and manufacture physical items.
HOW 3D PRINTERS WORK
Now let’s dive into the details. The most common type of 3D printing is known as “additive manufacturing” in
which small amounts of material are slowly built up into an object. The primary method of this is called FDM
(fused deposition modeling) or sometimes FFF (fused filament fabrication). FDM printers create objects by
building up material layer by layer over time. A thin strand of filament feeds into a part of the machine called
an extruder, which melts the plastic at a high temperature—typically around 200°C. There are many other
methods of 3D printing that this book will cover in later chapters, and they all work in the same “additive”
way. They bind, melt, or photo-polymerize (liquid resin which is hardened with UV light) material together to
create physical geometry.
The FDM process is very similar to using a hot glue gun. You probably have one at home and have used it for
craft or school projects. When you squeeze the handle of a hot glue gun, the solid glue is pressed against a
heating element and soft, spaghetti-like strands of molten glue extrude from the nozzle. Imagine swirling
those strands around and around on top of each other, forming circles that build up into a tube. As the glue
cools, it hardens, and a tube is created.
Following the glue gun analogy, in a 3D printer a thin strand of melted plastic is programmed to deposit
down, layer by layer, on a flat surface known as the build plate, where it cools and hardens into an object.
The 3D printer knows precisely where to trace each layer through instructions in a digital file sent from a
computer. The image in Figure F-3 provides a closer look at how this technology works.
Most consumer 3D printers use FDM technology and have a large spool of coiled plastic called filament
attached to them.
FIGURE F2: An early example of a person assembling a 3D printer from a kit.
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3D PRINTING IS NOT LIKE 2D PRINTING
In 2013, at our then retail 3D printing store in Oakland, California, the majority of the public had not made
the connection that 3D printers (which print three-dimensional objects) are very different from 2D printers
(which print flat images on paper). We used to get a lot of questions from casual visitors along the lines of,
“Where do you put the ink?” and “How much paper does it need?”
We would teach that you can’t print a “flat” graphical image such as a PDF or JPEG in 3D. A special kind of
digital file is needed to make a 3D print. That type of file is called a 3D model and it has three-dimensional
information about the object you want to build.
FIGURE F3: An extruder is depositing melted plastic one layer at a time to build a bottle (infographic HoneyPoint3D™)
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