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?)
Then Desktop Metal started to realize that enthusiastic acquisition made for great headlines but wasn't, you know, a business model. So they started looking to be acquired. For a while it was Stratasys, but Stratasys got cold feet and backed out. Then they talked to Nano Dimensions, but Nano also tried to back out. At this point Desktop Metal was making ominous statements -- if they didn't get acquired, they were doomed as a company.
DM wound up suing Nano to complete the acquisition. That finalized in April. Guess what? Last week Desktop Metal filed for bankruptcy anyhow. Guess it was doomed either way.
They say the decision was made by DM's "independent Board of Directors", but you don't have to read between the lines to see that Nano let them go hang. Nano is selling off whatever pieces of DM they think have any remaining value. The rest is trash.
(The Bloomberg article is titled "Desktop Metal Files Bankruptcy After Lawyers Demand Unpaid Fees". Here's an amusing quirk of the merger biz: DM's lawyers beat Nano's lawyers in court, so Nano had to acquire DM. Including their debts. Now DM's lawyer bill is on Nano's desk! What if Nano just tears it up? Matt Levine's column is a great primer for this sort of hilarity.)
Okay, so, that metal-printing process? It got spun off after the 2021 ExOne acquisition. Maybe more than once. It looks like nobody could make a go of it, even at the higher price. Probably the engineers who knew how to run the machines either retired or got shuffled out. By June, there just wasn't anybody left making bronze-steel parts; customer-facing sites yanked the material from their listings.
I am told that the machines themselves were probably not junked. They have other uses. You can do a steel-powder print and then sinter the part to solid steel. That's a steel-printing process -- but the parts shrink during sintering, and they don't shrink evenly. You can't do the kind of art prints I showed above.
The bronze-infiltration step solved that problem. You soak liquid bronze into the steel-powder print, driving out the air without changing the original dimensions. But that was fussy. It required hands-on experience to do the infiltration; it required hands-on experience to do the finishing.
(A lot of the stories from that part of industry were like, "There was only one guy who knew how to do that patina, and then he retired." Guy by guy, the material went away.)
So, as one article notes, a whole slew of other companies and technologies are facing the same fate. And if that sounds familiar, think about the Embracer Group in the games industry. Went on an acquisition spree around 2021; tried to get acquired; deal fell through. The studios they acquired are now collateral damage.
I suppose the lesson is that it's not just games. Technologies can vanish. Your job can vanish. Companies that you thought were parts of the landscape can vanish. Cities can vanish. The way you live can vanish.
Sorry -- I said it was a story. I didn't say it was a happy story.