chuckkir

Did you ever consider why gold has value? It's just shiny metal. Other than jewelry and some electronics uses, no one needs it. At one point it was useful to make coins (for fiat currencies) because it was rare, but now it's just valuable because "it always has been."

Additive manufacturing pretty much always needs some sort of leveling phase to cope with z-axis irregularities. Without that you can't hold tolerance. Furthermore without support material you're limited in what you can build.

Looking at the pictures this seems like it makes metallic blobs approximating the shape. I suppose if you have a CNC to post-process it into something closer that may be fine. It'd be nicer to do the machining on the fly, but with the width of the material deposition it looks like it would drip down the sides if you did that.

Yes; it leads to unexpected consequences. The worst students are the ones the that the professor has the most incentive to graduate. So paradoxically the better you are, the less likely you are to be done quickly.

I have my PhD, and this is the standard angst that many aspiring students face. There's a reason we have the term "ABD" for All But Dissertation. If he got that far into grad school without realizing that a Professor is an entrepreneur - hiring employees (grad students) to produce his product (knowledge) which he sells to customers (government and industry) through sales and marketing (conferences and papers) - then he was just naïve or kept the blinders on. My solution was to graduate and go into industry.