alt Hacker NewsPrinting is good for prototyping and if you are making small numbers/need to have a distributed manufacturing (because of bombs falling on them).
But for mass producing a solid design, 3D printing is the worst solution, because it is slow. Injection molding would be the fast (and cheap) way.
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> But for mass producing a solid design, 3D printing is the worst solution, because it is slow. Injection molding would be the fast (and cheap) way.
~10 years ago I was really into designing my own "drones" (but the kind that don't kill people) and I primarily used a CNC machine (Shapeoko 3).
Multirotor vehicles are a good match for designs that are a series of mostly flat plates connected via simple standoffs and you can knock those out really quick with a CNC machine.
Injection molding is certainly much better than 3D printing for scale, but CNC is a nice middle ground that allows for quick manufacture while still having a lot of the same flexibility for iterative design that you get with 3D printing.
Yeah but it's fast enough, light, portable, repairable, can be setup directly in your bunker in the middle of the wood if needed, etc.
You're still thinking like it's 1990