Now there’s another genius marketing strategy, everybody is going to need a 3d printer for all their marvellous ideas, but here’s the thing.........................ideas are like honest marketing people................as rare as rocking horse waste.

That was the report, think about it, the whole marketing premise was that everybody has these great ideas and everybody is going to need a 3d printer.
Most so called engineers I run into these days can’t be bothered to learn Solidworks despite spending 4 years at university with a free copy.

The last “mechanical engineer” I worked with thought a micron was 10mm and his dream was to open a car wash!

I did do a project fort a big marketing company recently to determine the quality of the 3d printers aimed at the general public.
The summary was, don’t waste your time.
Quality is garbage and who is going to spend £200-£700 plus the time to learn how to design the ideas when all they have to print is a couple of dolls for their children.

I refer you to the Big Bang Theory from some years ago.

Defiantly, there are some really good models out there but as you point out they cost decent money.
3d printing will always be there but the market I am talking about was never there, I sat around a conference table about 2 years ago and 3d printing was going to be the next iPhone.
The marketing professionals were raving about it, every home was going to have a 3d printer, one of them came to me to ask about software and when she produced the report, Blender was listed as a fairly easy learning curve for the average person!

Buy a 3d printer, buy some design software and buy a computer to design your great idea, yeah right!!!

People are not picking up on a very obvious fact, as an engineer why would I require one? The ironic answer is at our finger tips.

What do you mean who needs an engineer?
You are missing the whole point, engineers can’t engineer these days and you are expecting people who can barely work a pc to start fixing, designing and inventing things!!!
I asked a young so called engineer if he could change the wheel on his car, maybe he said, but he couldn’t.

My point is why would I need a 3d printer to design something when I have a 3d modelling system that is far more versatile and that can do far more a lot faster?

The only people who need 3d printers for prototype work are marketing engineers, they need something to hold in the hands whereas real engineers can hold designs in their heads an manipulate them in a 3d environment.

Shark can do everything a 3d printer can do and a whole lot more.

Murray you are another one missing the point, this whole 3d printing thing was about volume for the marketing parasites, that’s how they envisioned their next pay check.
Schools and home users are not going to fund their lavish lifestyles for much longer, they are like a plague of locusts.
At the marketing company I was contracting for I watched them waste $5 million in 3 months on sandwiches and having 50 hour meetings a week.

I am a contractor and within 2 weeks I had heard this saying from at least 3 permanent staff, “hey Craig have you heard the one about us and XXX, it took them 60 years to build up their business and it took us 2 years to destroy it!"
Or how about when one of my interns was over at our head office which was a couple of miles away from the development centre I was running
“Hey Craig you should have heard what I did, a new starter said that they were interested in buying one of our machines with the staff discount, the senior sales person said don’t, they are sh*t.

The ultimate question is not being answered, why does anybody need a 3d printer to prove out a design when 3d modelling software is far more powerful?
You have to use design software to design the product in the first place and that is all you really need to prove if an idea can work or has value, you do not need to print it.

You are 100% right about one thing; times do change but not in the way you are imagining, think about it logically.
People are streaming out of these so called universities and they are as dumb as a bucket of mud, this text is an example of what I receive from so called graduates.
"hi craig, plse may i put in a works rqst (lol you must think my English is so bad and i’m English, lol, lol, lol)", she then goes on to ask me to work out the volume of a simple waste bin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As for your analogy using secretaries, a secretary 20 years ago was 10 times smarter than most engineers today.
You just cannot have a politically correct system where people cannot get fired or told they are making mistakes, or a system where people make billions from sad losers spending hours online with non-existent friends.
A classic example is that American Taco Bell marketing idiot who assaulted the Uber driver and who is now suing him for filming the assault!


You like most people are giving humans too much credit, most haven’t got a clue and would not know a decent idea if it slapped them upside the head.
Baton down the hatches, 2016 is the year it all goes to hell, the lies, the fraud, the incompetence...........it’s all coming to an end.

The question that I would like answered is why people are so slow on picking up on my point, even when I was running laboratories at universities the young students had no concept of the power of 3d modelling systems.

They were using Solidworks and bringing me half finished designs to check before they were sent to the machine shop.
When I told them to continue with the modelling they got very frustrated and wanted to start the machining process before the design was complete at the modelling stage.

My main question is..........................why would I need a 3d printer to prove out an idea when I have a powerful piece of software that can do far more than any printer can?
Remember that you still have to design the component in the software before you print it, so what’s the point in printing it?

I am amazed at how slow the manufacturing and development world has been to pick up on the power of computer modelling, even the younger generations do not seem to understand it.
With software I can develop the component, make real time adjustments and see it working on a screen, I cannot do that with printing.
Sure I can print a part but if I need to adjust something I have to print another one whereas with software my changes are instant.

Yes industrial 3d printing is a very powerful tool but software is much more applicable to the home designer.