That first machine is still chugging in the back of his office, 3,500 hours and counting. “He woke me up at 3 in the morning,” recalls Eva Wolf, Erick’s wife and business partner. Wolf made his first printer from open-source designs he found in several different countries. “For rapid development, open-source is the way to go,” said Wolf. A closed-end system (like Apple’s) may end up costing more but be easier to use. Being more open (think Google and Android) allows manufacturers to use a wider variety of materials and appeals to buyers, like schools and hobbyists, that want to customize the machine or print their own parts. Others can print with a variety of materials but practically require an advanced degree to operate.Īs with the personal computer and smartphone industries, 3D printing’s ability to grow will depend to some degree on which path companies take on whether to adopt open-source, easily modified systems, or closed, proprietary ones. Some printers use proprietary materials that can be purchased only from the printer company. Everyone can compete.”īut the technology remains too expensive, kludgy and difficult to use for the average consumer. “Suddenly everyone can get into the game because the entry to manufacturing suddenly becomes so small. “You could print – make – at the source what you need,” said Marc Madou, a professor at UCI who is working on the university’s efforts in advanced manufacturing. UC Irvine is competing to become one of those hubs. That possibility is the focus of a $1 billion Obama administration initiative to set up a network of advanced manufacturing research hubs around the United States. There’d be no need to ship parts around the world when they can be printed next door. Imagine producing thousands of variations of an object, rather than millions of copies of the same thing.
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Today, a couple of Orange County companies, including Wolf’s Airwolf 3D in Costa Mesa, are doing their part to move 3D printing from a hobbyist’s toy into a mainstream technology that could shake up the world of manufacturing.ģD printing pops up in headlines every so often for enabling such oddities as a working plastic gun you can download and print in your bedroom, or a life-saving structure printed to the exact body specifications of a particular patient.īut if the technology ever becomes fast and efficient enough, 3D printers could turn factory economics on their head. “I realized I was going to have to make it myself, unfortunately.” “The mechanical purity of (the idea) really appealed to me,” he said. He was interested in a printer that could more or less print itself – churning out some of its own parts – but the one that arrived in the mail wasn’t up to par. He bought a printer just before Christmas 2011, then fought with it until New Years before scrapping the machine for parts.
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Wolf, 38, wanted a machine that could spit out plastic parts for a 1/10th scale model of a sports car he designed. Recently his divergent interests came together to land him in the world of 3D printing. He’s also a garage mechanic who bought cars cheap in high school, fixing them up and selling them for profit. 3D printing builds on itself – Orange County RegisterĮrick Wolf is a patent attorney with a mechanical engineering degree.