Innovation: Who Made That 3-D Printer?

It was the UV lights that gave Hull his insight in the first place. The lamps were used in factories to harden a plastic veneer onto tabletops or rubber tiles. Hull realized that he could use UV light to etch plastic layers into whatever shape he liked and then stack these layers to form a 3-D object.

At first he had to write code to tell his machine how to cut each layer, a painstaking process. “I was limited to fairly simple shapes,” he says. One day, for instance, he brought home a Munchkin-size cup to show his wife. “It looked like that thing you buy in the drugstore to wash out your eyes,” he says. And his first 3-D printer “was so kludged together that it looked post-apocalyptic, like some of the equipment they used in that movie ‘Waterworld.’ ”

But by the mid-1980s, the printer had evolved into a working product, albeit one with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the printer was too heavy to lug to demos, Hull made home movies to show to executives. “The movies were pretty corny,” but even so, he says, “we got a tremendous response.” Particularly in Detroit. “Back then, the U.S. automotive industry had fallen way behind Japan,” Hull says, and the car companies were desperate for a secret weapon. The 3-D printer was just that: Engineers could create their own prototypes for door handles or stick-shift knobs, rather than sending blueprints to a tool-and-dye shop, shaving months off the design process.

Now that the technology is becoming affordable (printers start at $1,299), all kinds of people have caught 3-D fever. A University of California professor is working on printing out an entire house. Another 3-D artist has sculpted a “cyborg hand” that lets his son (who was born without several fingers) pick up a water bottle. More disturbing, a group called Defense Distributed claims to have produced a working gun from open-source plans and then printed it out.

“Anything that can be made will be made by anyone anywhere,” wrote Joris Peels, a 3-D pioneer. “Anyone could 3-D-print a spoon, a land mine or a rose.”

PROJECT SKUNKWORKS

Tim Anderson co-founded Z Corp., which pioneered a fast method of 3-D printing.

How did you end up working on 3-D printers? I was living in a student-run machine shop at M.I.T. It was an anarchist utopia where you could just show up and tinker. I was making a robot named Van Gogo that painted oil paintings. One day I was wandering the halls of M.I.T. picking through junk piles, and I ended up meeting people in the basement of Building 35. They were doing research on 3-D printing, and they needed an electronics guy. I said I was one. They came over to see my painting robot, and then they went their merry way. Then I had the revelation: “Gee, I should follow up on this. Because I could do the same stuff I was doing as an artist, call myself an engineer and get paid.” That’s how I spent three years as a gnome inside a 3-D printer.

How did you first build a working prototype? I wasn’t hung up on appearances. I was Mr. Skunkworks. I went through junk piles to find parts from inkjet printers, and then built with those parts. We used a lot of inkjet nozzles in our machines.

What were some of the earliest things that you scanned and printed at Z Corp.? The printer was popular right away for medical imaging. So we had a lot of skulls around. It’s good for surgeons to be able to see skulls in 3-D and practice breaking them and putting them back together.

The 3-D Printer May Be the Home Appliance of the Future

When Brook Drumm saw clips from the speech at his home outside Sacramento, Calif., he wanted to reach through his TV and give the president a fist bump. Mr. Drumm, a bald, goateed father of three, designed the Printrbot, a desktop 3-D printer kit. Like a number of other 3-D printers, it uses heated plastic — applied layer by layer to a heated bed by a glue-gun-like extruder — to turn designs created on a computer into real objects.

As Mr. Drumm illustrated in the Kickstarter campaign he used to raise more than $830,000 to start his business in late 2011, the Printrbot is small enough to fit on a kitchen counter, next to the Mr. Coffee. “The goal for the company,” Mr. Drumm said in world-beating tones, “is a printer in every home and every school.”

The technology for 3-D printing has existed for years, and President Obama was referring to its applications in manufacturing. But there is a growing sense that 3-D printers may be the home appliance of the future, much as personal computers were 30 years ago, when Dick Cavett referred to the Apple II in a TV commercial as “the appliance of the ’80s for all those pesky household chores.”

Like computers, 3-D printers originally proved their worth in the business sector, cost a fortune and were bulkier than a Kelvinator. But in the last few years, less expensive desktop models have emerged, and futurists and 3-D printing hobbyists are now envisioning a world in which someone has an idea for a work-saving tool — or breaks the hour hand on their kitchen clock or loses the cap to the shampoo bottle — and simply prints the invention or the replacement part.

Bre Pettis, the chief executive officer of MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based company leading the charge in making 3-D printers for the consumer market, has seen how the technology is already being applied. “We have stories of people who have fixed their blenders, fixed their espresso machine,” he said.

A file-sharing database MakerBot oversees, called Thingiverse, currently holds more than 36,000 downloadable designs. “One of my favorite stories from Thingiverse is a dad who has a daughter who is 41 inches tall,” Mr. Pettis said. “They were going to an amusement park, and she wasn’t going to be able to go on any of the rides because the minimum height was 42 inches. The dad made orthopedic inserts for her shoes.”

Last fall, MakerBot opened what may be the first retail store devoted to 3-D printers, in Lower Manhattan. Inside, demonstration models of the company’s Replicator 2, a slick, steel-framed machine with the boxy dimensions of a microwave that sells for about $2,200, are constantly printing, turning files created on Trimble SketchUp and other computer-aided design (CAD) software into things like architecture models or smartphone cases.

Emmanuel Plat, director of merchandising for the Museum of Modern Art’s retail division, said that in his experience, watching a 3-D printer work can induce future shock. “When people see the machine function, they’re mesmerized,” said Mr. Plat, who counts himself among those impressed.

As part of its “Destination: NYC” collection in May, the MoMA Design Store will feature a Replicator 2 printing New York-themed items for sale, like a miniature skyscraper or taxi; people can also buy the printer, Mr. Plat said.

In an age when shooting video with a phone and sending it to a friend across the world is old hat, it’s not easy to wow anyone with technology. Still, everywhere he goes lately, Mr. Plat said he hears people gushing about 3-D printing. “The word is out in the design community and creative community,” he said. “The applications are limitless.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Cute Androids From a 3-D Printer

While the iPhone 5 still commands the spotlight, the Android smartphone operating system has something that Apple never will: an adorable mascot, the Droid.

The popular little robot figure has inspired plush toys, artwork and key chains. Now 3D Systems, maker of the $1,300 home Cube 3-D printer, is using its technology to let people imagine their own variations and print them as figurines.

Here’s how it works. Go to Cubify, the company’s site, to create what it calls a Bugdroid. There an unadorned green Android awaits for your design.

A menu lets you choose options like costumes, insignia, poses and colors. You can then drag accessories to the drawing, like a selection of hats, ties or sergeant stripes, or print what you want on it. The company says there are more than eight million possible combinations.

The objects are then made on a $45,000 or $70,000 industrial printer that can achieve much higher resolution than home desktop machines. In 3-D printing, higher resolution means smoother transitions between the thin layers deposited to form the object.

The custom figurines have a slightly rough texture. They are made of a combination of gypsum powder and binder, so if dropped on a hard surface they can break like pottery.

The price of the Android statuettes vary by size. The $30 one is 2.5 inches tall, the $35 is 3 inches, and the $40 is 3.5 inches.

If you lack imagination, or the time, to construct your own figurine, the company provides a library of predesigned figures like graduates and card dealers, 2.25 inches tall, for $22 each.

Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button

Lance Rosenfield for The New York Times Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, is working to design and create a gun using 3-D printing technology.

It has long been possible to make a gun at home. But what happens when it no longer takes knowledge and skill to build one?

It won’t be long before a felon, unable to buy a gun legally, can print one at home. Teenagers could make them in their bedroom while their parents think they are “playing on their computer.” I’m talking about a fully functional gun, where the schematic is downloaded free from the Internet and built on a 3-D printer, all with the click of a button.

Hit print, walk away, and a few hours later, you have a firearm. There are no background checks. No age limits. No serial numbers etched on the barrel or sales receipts to track the gun.

It might sound like science fiction, but 3-D printers are quickly becoming a consumer product. These printers, which now cost about $1,000, can print objects by spraying thin layers of plastic, metal or ceramics that are built up into shapes. Long used by industrial companies to make prototypes and parts, 3-D printers are becoming faster and less expensive almost weekly. One manufacturer, MakerBot, has set up a retail store in Manhattan. Chinese companies have started making them, and prices are falling to about $500.

Michael Guslick A fully functional semi-automatic gun, partly manufactured on a 3-D printer.

Hobbyists have printed fairly rudimentary objects: prosthetics, iPhone cases, cat statues and missing luggage clasps.

A number of people have already made gun parts using 3-D printers. And yes, the guns with these parts have successfully fired bullets. Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, is in the process of building a completely functional printed gun. “We hope to have this fully tested and put the files online in the next couple of months,” said Mr. Wilson, who runs a Web site called Defense Distributed.

He calls the gun the Wiki Weapon. In a video explaining the project’s goals, he describes the Wiki Weapon as the world’s first “3-D printable personal defense system.”

“What’s great about the Wiki Weapon is it only needs to be lethal once,” Mr. Wilson says in the video, in a monotone voice. “We will have the reality of a weapons system that can be printed out from your desk. Anywhere there is a computer, there is a weapon.”

Under most circumstances, it is not illegal to build your own gun, but it has been pretty difficult. Ginger Colbrun, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said people had made firearms out of pens, books and belt buckles. But those contraptions and conventional firearms require a certain amount of knowledge and skill.

Ms. Colbrun said the agency was keeping a close watch on 3-D printers. “A.T.F. always tries to stay ahead of the illegal activity and the novel firearms trafficking schemes, without impinging on individuals’ rights,” she said.

But monitoring whether people make their own guns on a 3-D printer is going to be impossible, barring sticking an A.T.F. agent in every home. It’s also hopeless to try to build a technology into these printers that prevents people from printing a gun. One project mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s video, called the RepRap printer, will be capable of replicating itself by printing other 3-D printers.

After committing a crime with a printed weapon, a person could simply melt down the plastic and reprint it as something as mundane as a statue of Buddha. And guns made of plastic might not be spotted by metal detectors in airports, courthouses or other government facilities.

“This becomes scary when you consider the fact that it could be yet another opportunity for people to evade background checks and get a gun,” said Daniel Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The National Rifle Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Given the number of existing loopholes and the ease with which people can buy firearms on the Internet, people printing guns might seem like adding a drop of water to an Olympic-size swimming pool. According to an annual report released by the A.T.F., more than 5.5 million guns are made in the United States each year, and millions more are imported.

“Forty percent of guns are sold through a loophole at gun shows, where people are already able to buy a firearm without having to go through a background check,” Mr. Gross said. “There’s already a permanent ‘gun show’ on the Internet.”

Michael Guslick, an amateur gunsmith who has written extensively online about the considerable challenges of 3-D printed guns, said people had been experimenting with homemade guns for some time. He said the most notable example was the zip gun, which is made from off-the-shelf plumbing parts. (Not surprisingly, the schematics and instructions can be downloaded online.)

“This is just applying a different technology to something that is already being done,” he said. “But making one on a 3-D printer is a lot of work when your local plumbing department is so close by.”

For now, the task isn’t as easy as hitting print, say the few people who have successfully built guns using 3-D printers. The basic problem is not the printing technology, but the lack of plastics strong enough for a real gun.

But this year, Mr. Guslick managed to print some components for an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle — the kind of gun used in the Aurora, Colo., shootings — on a 3-D printer. He used ABS plastic, “the same plastic used to make Legos.”

He was particularly interested in printing a part called the lower receiver, which connects the trigger, grip and magazine holder. “I used my home 3-D printer to make the lower receiver, which is the only regulated component of a gun,” he said. “Every other part you can legally pick up at your local gun shop.”