If You Can Draw It, They Can Make It

On the battlefield and in the lab, 3D printers are evolving into minifactories

Business Week 05/23/05
author: Adam Aston
(Copyright 2005 McGraw-Hill, Inc.)

Designers still can't prevent the sorts of low-tech failures that have bedeviled armies for millennia. A missing bolt can stop a convoy. A bent machine-gun mount can leave soldiers vulnerable, or make a Humvee unusable.

But military engineers have developed a high-tech way to fix these failures on the fly. At sites in Iraq and Kuwait the Army has deployed a factory that fits in an air-transportable container. It's called the Mobile Parts Hospital, and inside, technicians use workstations and robotic machine tools to fabricate parts on the fly. In the next phase, lasers will "print" powdered metal, layer by layer, to create fully functional replacements. Talk about just in time: The approach can save months, compared to waiting for resupply. What's more, like the M*A*S*H units after which they're modeled, "the Parts Hospital has saved lives," writes Bruce Neighbor, a second lieutenant with the 1486th Transportation Company in Iraq in an e-mail.

The rollout of the MPH is a landmark for the army and may mark the beginning of a new kind of manufacturing. From their origins as design tools, three-dimensional printers are evolving into minifactories for the workaday world, able to transform digital designs into plastic, ceramic, or metal reality. And as these systems get cheaper, more versatile, and smaller, "rapid manufacturing" promises to transform supply chains by cutting the need for large stocks of parts, as well as the trucks to move them, and the warehouses to store them. It could also help unleash an era of personalized customization.

This is a pretty cool technology. If you ever get a chance to watch one of these printers in action take it. It is a marvel to watch. The possibilities are endless.