Beginning Design for 3D Printing

CHAPTER 1

What’s Possible with 3D Printing?

Game-changing, groundbreaking, enabling, and disruptive are just a few of the many words used to describe the growing manufacturing technology known as 3D printing. As an established means of making things (3D printing is more than 30 years old and was conceived by Chuck Hull in 1983), 3D printing is an additive fabrication process that can turn digital computer-generated geometry into physical objects using a variety of materials through a layer-by-layer building process. Because of many recent developments, this amazing process of making things has become a mainstream means of production and is ...