I think the printer market is the 1910 radio market. Ed makes a pretty good case that it will never be the 1928 radio market. Maybe none of us knows anyone who could be a part of the listener (only) market. After all when you've printed a couple of chess sets and every imaginable troll, elf, or frog, what are you going to do then?
most people just don't make things. I'm not sure Ed's observation that the process is slow and the materials are not great is the reason it won't happen. And probably the availability of a whole lot of neat things on thingiverse won't do it either. the mass market doesn't make things and probably has no inclination in that direction.
About a third of the people who ask me about my printer don't realize that I have to design and model the things I make, and it isn't with free-hand sketches either. They need some grasp of geometry to get from here to there and a lot of them don't have it.
notwithstanding the above, cheap radio receivers and the whole broadcast system were unimaginable in 1910.
is printer market similar to 1910 radio market?
Re: is printer market similar to 1910 radio market?
Perhaps Makerbot (aka Stratasys) or 3DS would be a better choice for that question, but (as nearly as I can tell) they want other manufacturers to supply "DIY repair part" models to be built on their printers; they don't supply models for their own hardware.zemlin wrote:Maybe you should ask MakerGear
For enthusiasts (you know who you are), building a replacement knob that takes several hours to produce, doesn't look like the original, has a hand-knitted surface texture, and requires a bit of fiddling to make it fit counts as fun. That level of customer satisfaction doesn't scale into the mass market; for ten bucks, you might buy a knob from Amazon and move on.
https://softsolder.com/2015/11/09/tecum ... ttle-knob/
There may be a business opportunity for enthusiasts to build non-stock repair parts for other folks, but (to strain the original analogy), that's not how the TV hardware market works: we don't ask someone else to watch a program on their TV for us.