The age of bronze and steel
Here's a story I heard last night about 3D printing.
(I'm not in the 3D-printing scene. I know people who are, though. And it's an interesting story, what the hell. If I can blog about dirty sea shanties, I can blog about the additive manufacturing industry.)
A couple of months ago I retwooted this message about the end of a particular 3D-printed-metal process:
Binder jetted steel with bronze infiltration is no more: the last source has discontinued the technology. All service bureaus that offered this material have taken it down, which tends to confirm my (and their) understanding that no one is continuing it. 20 years we dreamed together. It could do what other binder jetting processes couldn't and can't, and I built my art practice around it. Well, the market has spoken. If you own a piece in this material, now you have a historical artifact. --@bathsheba, Jun 10
I followed up with these two objects I own that were printed this way:
"Zarf" (Bathsheba) and a Myst marker switch (Cyan).
So what happened?
If you look back to 2021, a company called Desktop Metal was buying up a whole chunk of the 3D printing industry. That included ExOne, the originator of this particular metal-printing process.
They immediately jacked up the process's sticker price. That marker switch model cost me about $100 in 2018 -- awfully good for a one-off custom metal object. In 2022, it would probably have cost me three times that. Seems that ExOne was pricing their stuff low to build a market and make them look like a good buyout target. (Sound familiar?)
... continue reading