Mr. Coffy: Don’t piss him off!
Grant Miller – a designer who was kind enough to allow me to animate and offer his 3D Printer STL files on my website has a new file that’s rendering away on my laptop… Mr. Coffy. I really like this design – it’s creative – think Mr. Potato mating with an Octopus and that eye thing from “Big Trouble in Little China” fame and he’s the offspring!
The first thing I think about after seeing this model was – can it be made with a laser or table router? The question is yes… second question is how many pieces and the answer is, how many do you want – in other words, how accurate to Grant’s design do you want the laser or table router or even plasma cut version to be to the original? Throw-in the material thicknesses involved and you can easily run into the thousands of pieces layed one above the other.
What I’m coming to is that with a 3D printer – like the Cube I’ll be getting tomorrow from FedEx – is that when you are dealing with fractions of a mm (0.2mm for my 3D Systems Cube), the other CNC technologies I mentioned get left far behind. With a 3D printer, I press print and a few hours later, I have an exact copy of Mr. Coffy – no assembly required and if it has moving parts – that’s all printed in one shot! This isn’t possible with the Cube as it’s FDM based but that is where things are on the higher-end machines including the Formlab.
This begs the question, where will lasers, plasmas and table routers be in the future if 3D is so powerful? Will subtractive ever be replaced with additive technologies? Eventually, absolutely – and it will go even further – down to the molecular level so we aren’t talking about subtractive vs additive but elemental self-forming materials that take-on any shape you can imagine!
I realized a few years ago that not every home will have a laser cutter – although CNC table routers are amazing – the same prediction holds true. They are still technically too advanced for most people to wrap their head around – I wouldn’t let my ShopBot Desktop run on my kitchen table with kids playing around it! A 3D printer is a very different animal though – sure, it can burn you but you really have to TRY to get burned – a laser, you have to lift the lid (turning it off) and overide the safety triggers or with a table router – well, it will blend your fingers nicely and just keep on going.
I think we are only at the beginning of the CNC revolution, these three main machines being used now (4th being plasma) are all just STARTING but I’m already noticing lots of similarities between them as I modify and design projects specifically optimized to the CNC it will be cut, formed or molded into. All these technologies have varying levels of shelf-life left in them – at the industrial level, all four technologies will be used for decades well into the second part of this century but at the desktop level – where you can’t cutting through 3 inches of steel but making little “things” to sell or use yourself – that’s where the true innovation will happen. Why? Because you can sell MILLIONS of these machines – it’s a volume business with massive technological and consumer pressures to make them faster, cheaper and ultimately, safer.
All that being said, I have a feeling that my grand kids will look back at all I’ve done with CNCKing.com and wonder why I spent so much time building such out-of-date projects that people with transient self-forming liquids do everyday when they become my age – the answer is simple. I love designing, I love helping other designers SELL their stuff and I enjoy the CNC community greatly. All that being said, this isn’t WoodMarvels.com anymore – it’s CNCKing.com – so who knows – I might jump into the self-forming liquid project file business as well because I can guarantee one thing – they will be run by CNC machines!