A Bracket to Change the World

I've known about JLC3DP's short run printing services for a while but, until recently, hadn't had the right project for them. They do steel and and titanium selective laser melting. It's roughly the texture, strength and durability of investment casting, but more porous and lighter. There's also PCBWay in the same space, except they don't do titanium, they do aluminium instead. JLP3DP are a little cheaper in steel, than PCBWay's price in aluminium, which led me to try steel for a pair of brackets in a luggage rack height increase on my Greenspeed trike, in an effort to get the battery ablve the rear wheel, so I can get my seat more reclined. AU$40.32 for 2 custom brackets, opposite hand, in 316 stainless, is probably less than I'd pay for a stock fitting off-the-shelf, and I can't get this bracket anywhere, because it isn't stock and stock won't fit.

Lets ponder this for a moment. 3D printed, bespoke, stainless steel parts, for roughly what you'd pay for the same weight of a 316 grade mass-produced part, assuming such a part were available. When I first took up 3D printing, in 2018, SpaceX were just making the news for 3D printing rocket engines in million dollar machines. 7 years later, I can design a part that I can't buy, and buy a print of it that cost about what a similar, but unsuitable part would probably cost. Printed on a $300,000 machine. I've looked at the website of a company 25km from my home that sells these industrial machines. This is way beyond Moore's Law - the doubling in scale and halving of cost every few years. This will be home workshop tech in 10 years, at this rate.

The bracket that might change the world

Now Police and politicians like to talk a big scary future with 3D printed guns, but the real danger of this technology is not weapons. The danger, for the establishment at least, is the inability to control scarecity. Suppose you can design your own tools - it's already easy enough to do this, we've had 40 years since MacDraw, the first easy, graphical, personal computer design software. We're spoiled for choice, OnShape, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD (I use the latter mostly, sometimes the second, where I need a more organic shape) and a slew of professional tools in this field. Then there are the animation and graphics modelling tools like Blender, these make designing characters, digital puppets, as it were, easy. What if we were able to have a one cubic metre machine that could render a metal, or multicolour plastic armature or device that could be a tool, a replacement machine part, a spare part for your car... Is this the beginning of the Star Trek replicator economy. The true absence of scarcity?

Star Trek replicators reconstitute the ship's wastes at the molecular level, according to the show's own descriptions in dialog. We're a long way from, if it's even possible, that level of recycling, but we're as little as half a decade from that output. The older AIs that folded proyeins without massive server farms could probably run on the computer hardware embedded in my Anycubic Kobra S1 plastic filament printer. There is no need to burn the planet to have the computers help us design the things we need but can no longer buy or design the things we want that don't yet exist. You don't need to know how to use CAD software if there are pro-forma models that we can change colours or sizes of, then print them. This already happens with plastic filament and resin setting printers. Printables is a database of opensource hardware, as is Thingiverse, MakerOnline and many others. We are so close to being able to universally break the back of Capitalism's manufactured scarcity model, it's more elating than scary!

There are scary aspects, though, and firearms are the least of it. The billionaires, the so-call one-percent, are already planning how to limit our access to universal manufacturing machines. Imagine a machine that uses a laser to melt wax, plastic, metal or glass, cooking in impurities in some stages, to make electronics. Now imagine that machine as a free-opensource design. The only way this can be controlled is by banning ownership of these machines or their plans. Yet, unlike drugs, the people will want these machines or their products, banning will be way harder than firearms or elicit drugs, because ordinary people will want their unique tools, their one-off memorabilia, their custom restoration part for their antique widget, a part that hasn't been availble for decades... or centuries. And the open hardware and software will allow people to clone the universal manufacturing machines. We are on the verge of science fiction becoming domestic fact!

The Chinese CNC laser that is making my luggage brackets for my recumbent trike is the first Star Trek Replicator. It really, really is! It's also the last factory based manufacturing machine, or near last, at least. The home factory is 3 orders of magnitude price drop from being a garage workshop machine, then a home workshop machine, then an appliance like a blender, a loom or a sewing machine. Then it'll just be like a TV in the corner, "Make me an M6 bolt, nut and 2 washers to suit, aluminium." Or, "Tea, earl grey, hot." This is socialism, this is the end to poverty and servitude. Even if it takes a war to liberate this economy, this economy is inevitable.

If we don't fuck up the planet along the way.