We don’t how many RepRap 3D printers are in existence, and that’s because everyone who owns a RepRap can use it to make another – and another, and another. The RepRap’s creator, Adrian Bowyer, designed it to be self-replicating. We sat down with him to talk about the international community of enthusiasts that brought RepRap to fruition, and how open-source hardware can help propel a low-cost design to popularity and world domination.
TechRadar: How did RepRap start?
Adrian Bowyer: I’ve always been interested in the idea of an artificial, self-replicating machine. As a child, it seemed obvious to me that human beings don’t make things in the right way.
Plants make things in the most efficient way. The plant is a self-replicating object, entirely composed of self-replicating cells. So if you want to make things, you start with things that can make themselves. That’s the basis of what was going on in my mind.
I bought a couple of 3D printers. They were big commercial machines – the only type available then – and the cheapest one was worth £250,000. We started using them, and found them to be a very useful resource.
As an engineer, it was complete liberation. I could just think of something, design it and have it in my hand. It also occurred to me that we had a technology that was versatile enough to replicate itself. That’s where the idea "we’ll make a 3D printer that prints itself" came from.
I realised we had to make this open source. This is because if you have a self-replicating machine and try to close it off and copyright it, you’re basically saying you’re trying to stop the one thing that you designed the machine to do.
TR: How long was it from the initial start to having a working printer?
AB: Work actually started in 2005 and we had our first functioning machine two years later in 2007. A year later, that machine had printed a complete set of parts to make a copy of itself.
Obviously, there were tweaks and changes along the way. We made the very first copy in May 2008. Therefore, by that point we’d reached a partially self-replicating printer.
We never thought from the beginning it would be able to print 100% of itself. The idea was to print all the fiddly pieces and make sure all the other bits required to make the machine were widely available. It’s about 50/50 – 50% printed parts and 50% bought parts. We’ve got the specialist parts down to just one or two.
TR: What was the first thing that you printed?
AB: One of the very first things we printed was a coat hook. An economist once told me that the world market for coat hooks is bigger than that of jet engines. When you think about it, it isn’t that surprising – it’s just you never think of coat hooks as being major engineering products in the same way as jet engines.
TR: And that model could be uploaded?
AB: We did upload it, so anyone who wants to print that part can. The whole law of intellectual property is quite interesting. If you’re Ford or whoever, you can’t patent a bonnet latch like an idea.
You can patent the design, but that just stops people copying the computer files – they can’t stop you copying the object. You can’t copyright a 3D object unless it’s a sculpture.
TR: Do you see this causing changes in the law further down the line?
AB: That’s difficult to say – how would it be policed? We have copyright for music and it’s effectively ignored by millions of human beings. So if you try and pass a law that makes what everyone does in the privacy of their own home an offence, it’s never going to work.
That’s the position the music industry found itself in, and therefore had to adapt and now we have Spotify. That seems to be the way things go: the established industries find that their market is being undermined by some new technology, so it tries to regulate.
TR: Talking of legislation, there were the guys that printed their own gun…
AB: There’s a law that says you can’t export designs for weapons in the United States and I suspect there is probably something similar in the UK too. I don’t know. Distributing a file in that case becomes illegal.
The printed gun was frightfully, frightfully depressing from my point of view. Not because of the gun – the gun is useless and it represents no real danger. The thing that was terribly depressing was the horrible exposure it gave to the complete ignorance among journalists and politicians about how things are made.
If you want to make a proper gun – a real gun that works – get a lathe. People have owned lathes for 200 years, ever since the industrial revolution. You can go on Ebay and buy one for about the same cost as a 3D printer. My recommendation to anyone buying a 3D printer to make a gun is not to bother.
TR: Do you have any numbers on the uptake of 3D printers?
AB: We certainly don’t know how many RepRaps are out there. Our company sells thousands per year, and we are just one of a score of such companies. We don’t know what the ratio is between private builders and commercial companies selling kits. There must be tens of thousands out there, possibly even hundreds of thousands – we simply don’t know.
There was an attempt a few years ago to do a statistical survey to estimate the population of RepRaps. Rather cleverly, using some of techniques that biologists use for assessing populations – such as evaluating how many foxes there are per square mile – you can carry out statistical estimates of numbers. You obviously can’t go and count them all!
So three or four years ago, they came up with the answer of several thousand. The number has increased exponentially since then.
TR: They’ve been busy replicating themselves!
AB: Well, quite. An awful lot of people print machines for their friends. One of the things I can tell you is that the ratio of uptake between private individuals and commercial organisations is about 80:20. About 80% of machines go into private hands, while 20% go to schools, companies and the rest, which I find quite encouraging.
TR: We presume these are tech-savvy folk?
AB: Yes. Occasionally people get a little out of their depth when they’re building a machine. But of course, because the instructions are online, people can read them all. Before even getting a machine, they’ve got a pretty clear idea of what’s involved and can either be put off or can say, "Yeah – I can do that!"
TR: Where do you see 3D printers going?
AB: They’re becoming easier to use and put together. We’ve got a new RepRap coming out that’s deliberately designed to be far easier to assemble. The previous machine would take about 20 hours, when being assembled by someone who knew what they were doing. In contrast, this one will take two hours and we want to progress in that direction.
If you’ve got a machine that is genuinely self-replicating, then any time required for human intervention is a significant impediment to its reproductive success in biological terms. If you can put one together in five minutes, then that’s much better. So all RepRap companies are working towards improving the self-assembling machine.
There’s another thing that you can do with the machines. We have a bendy plastic and a rigid plastic, and you can vary proportions so you have an object that’s rigid at one end and bendy at the other.
There is virtually no other conventional technology that lets you do that as a single item. But it’s a trick biology uses all the time – this bit’s bendy [pushes nose] and this bit is rigid [points to arm].
TR: So do you see this opening up new manufacturing techniques?
AB: And new types of products that are simpler but with more complex functionality. If you can change the material properties of an object in a controlled way, then you can achieve an awful lot more.
Virtually everything that has been manufactured is made of different materials, but there is a sharp transition and they’re made in different processes.
If you can make them all in one process and have graduation between them and mixtures between them, then you can do an awful lot more. It liberates you in terms of how you design things and how machines work.
3D printing explained: what’s it all about?
Link:
Interview: The 3D printers that print themselves: how RepRap will change the world