On the Editor's Bench

摘要

Over the past six months I've had the opportunity to be involved in the construction of some specialist educational equipment that has involved the use of 3D printed parts. Whilst one of these only made incidental use of bespoke handles and latch parts, the other is mostly 3D printed. It's a piece of 'laboratory' equipment for demonstrating water flow in different habitats in schools. Although other materials, acrylic, aluminium alloy, wood and glass, are used, 3D printed parts hold everything together and allowed complex multifunctional elements to be made that would have been impractical to make in almost any other way other than fabrication. I'm convinced that 3D printing really is going to become a mainstream part of many people's engineering hobby in the next ten or fifteen years, just as we have seen with CAD and CNC.