>Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably.
Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)
Pretty much for the reason you covered in paragraph one to be honest.
If I can achieve good with 10k and someone else can achieve awesome with 100k then the person with 100k will win (assuming they can handle demand).
It's pretty obvious (if you look at..well every economic system ever really) that capital begets capital.
It's not a huge thing, the US had this issue at the turn of the 20th century.
Bitcoin mining was a good example. Everyone has a graphics card, and mining was pretty trivial. Great example of a cheap capital asset with low effort to monetize. Quickly, the ROI slimmed until only large scale operations with low costs and good economies of scale were profitable.
I think on some level society has always known this, having access to large amounts of capital doesn't guarantee you'd win but if someone offered me the choice between starting a game of monopoly with $100 or $100,000 I know which I'd pick.
Fun trivia aside, Monopoly was created to demonstrate that activities that promote wealth creation are more beneficial than ones that allow monopolists to run amock.
A) < $100
B) Saving $1000/year relative to a certain level of cuisine consumption.
The ability to rapidly prototype in low cost, low latency iterations will be a boon across many industries - regardless of whether or not you end up outsourcing production.
And of course, you may just end up outsourcing down the road.
From a marketing standpoint alone the ability to rapidly produce metal cases for things would give products an air of quality that you could never match with a plastic 3D printer and might cost too much to CNC. Between this and the costs of pick-and-place machines coming down I'd love the ability to design/build my own consumer electronics products and sell them out of my garage.
For better or worse it's a long ways from "machining/printing a part" to having something ready to sell. Even just dealing with aluminum (easy to machine), you have deburring, polishing and/or tumbling, and (probably) anodizing standing in the way of selling your new consumer part. Some of that is fairly easy to get going with - small scale anodize is problematic.
I can imagine those companies buying these machines and passing on the cost savings -- I would definitely start to think about using it instead of CNC.
I can think of a few things where printing 50 of them in an hour would be adequate to recoup a $100 equipment rental.
Not every metal part requires the 0.001" tolerance you can get with CNC as well.
I look at it as another technology that can be selected when the parameters make sense for it. I'm more familiar with plastic technologies, for them I switch between FDM, SLS, SLA, Polyjet and Injection Molding depending on:
- Forecasted quantity
- Time to market needed
- Price constraints
- Accuracy and surface finish required
- Design requirements
Each technology has it's own advantages and disadvantages.
Make a lot of parts on a printer and you spend a little more time designing the part and time to tune the settings (which might be done depending on the material you use) and you're off and printing and just paying for print time. Not cheap, but cheaper than paying techs at mid-scale.
But the reverse is also true of 3d printing, frequently I've wanted more control of some particular aspect of the printing job, but existing slicing packages make that very difficult. For example, just slow down the printing along one edge (rather than a whole layer), or change the infill for one particular area, or more detailed temp control of "inactive" nozzles, or just more options during nozzle switch (aka pause for 20 seconds to cool the inactive 10C while heating the active, then wipe both).
The rate at which the price of this technology is falling is fantastic.
At 360k, most machine shops can easily afford it if they can justify the purchase with demand. Also, almost no one buys these outright because they can easily finance it with a loan secured by the machine itself. We're talking a midlevel machinist's salary and overhead for five years. Since the majority of domestic metal manufacturing is for high margin industries with poor turn around times, these machines would pay for themselves very fast.
Still, doing so and offering "3D metal printing as a service" (3DMPaaS) might actually be a useful investment.