The Great Treat Forward: printing airplane parts in your garage
The Great Treat Forward:
Do they print them out from pig iron?
Only the finest discount-submarine-grade carbon fiber.
“this is your captain speaking. We are still trying to pair the Logitech F710 to the plane, but we should be ready for takeoff within the next ten minutes”
First as farce, then as farce, then as farce, then as…
No way would they not try to reinvent the wheel
There are 3-D printers for metal. There’s a few different designs. All of them, however, are large, industrial machines meant to be installed on a factory floor or lab. You can’t just set one up in your garage. Their size alone is a limiting factor.
Pretty neat tech that’s constantly improving. But like with all 3-D printed stuff, they’re meant more for stuff like making quick replacements for specialized components. For mass production? Absolutely fucking garbage idea. It’s like thinking an inkjet printer you use at home is the most effective way to publish daily newspapers.
Making a
pig irontitanium furnace in my back yardhey now i knew a guy who built an ultralight
These are the people calling communists econ 101 dropouts
It’s basic
economicsbiologymetallurgy!
Can these people get any dumber? Science must know.
Killing the Ministry of Education just to test it
They will always build a bigger idiot to tackle any notion that we can’t get dumber
American exceptionalism
i don’t think i want to get on a plane with parts made in the same machine Doug McBurgerson uses to print his DnD minis
I’m getting a real big “Mao’s backyard furnaces” vibe from this whole situation.
The great leap backwards
Next Trump will propose helping America’s farmers out by ordering all the sparrows killed.
Instead of farm collectivization, we’ll get farm redistribution.
Every farm will be divided up so that every single citizen can be their own farmer on their own private field.
i want to plamt burgers on my farm, where is burger seede
ranch sauce comes from a ranch right
i planted food seed hours ago! where is my food
so hungry
food seeds gain one growth stage on the daily reset, come back at midnight 2-4 days after planting depending on your Fast Farming tier
Nah, they’ll just forcibly convert the homeless into involuntary sharecroppers.
Uber-ized sharecroppers.
They’re practically small business owners!
using a massive series of potato batteries to smelt bauxite for the aircraft industry (idaho russets, of course)
Doing the pig iron bit from the Great Leap Forward but it’s Jethro Gramble making the aileron for your passenger jet out of an old snow shovel.
their backyard pig iron furnaces, our entrepreneurial garage 3d printing
Gonna start 3d printing $500 screws for the government
I need some aviation grade aluminum.
I happen to be an aviation aluminum maker. Here you go!
Thx
Lmao, I crossed the original again recently
“Bad news? We’re absolutely doing this. Good news? Our build quality can’t get that much worse and ATC is going to be so broken down it’s not worth building planes to last more than a handful of flights anyway…so 
”Ah yes, airworthy aluminum 3d printed, of course. Perhaps we can get the aluminum geniuses at Tesla on it.
Better yet, I’ve seen some YouTube videos of a guy running an aluminum forge with empty soda cans and a real big propane tank in his backyard. So they should hire me to do it.
I love those videos. It’s basically just an hour of unnecessary carbon emissions, but I find them so relaxing.
All Americans know how to do is live off rentierism, make powerpoints, and go to dinner parties.
Boeing is literally falling apart at the seams and you want to seek solutions from within?
To be fair Boeing is the one company with a less reliable more enshitified product than a consumer printer so this could actually be an improvement.
Artisan airplane manufacturers. Late stage capitalism turns into medieval guild economics, shit maybe this is neo-feudalism.
Fill out your apology forms to Yanis Varoufakis
3D printing tech has done leaps and bounds over the last 5-10 years, but my understanding is that printing high quality parts takes lots of time, and hitting the same volume as injection moulding, machining etc is still not possible. Regardless of available tech, an incredible push would need to be done to develop the capacity, and that push needs to materialize yesterday. Short answer, not shot baby
Not even close to possible. Casting and/or CNC, or injection molding machining is still the primary way parts are made, 3D printing is usually used exclusively for prototyping.
Not to mention tolerance/fidelity. One print can be completely off from another due to random shit. If you’re trying to make parts that are consistently the same, you won’t beat the methods you described.
These people think everything is just magic. Add in their arrogance and you get hot takes featured in the OP. “lol stupid machinists why u don’t just push printer button? I could do ur job from my house. U are unskilled labor.”
Tbh 3d prints have high precision compared to other manufacturing methods. I think the biggest problem is some production methods make the material stronger. For example: permenant die casting and bulk metal forming. There is a limit to how strong you can make stuff by just changing the metalurgy. Another example: every bolt used in aviation must have its thread formed by thread rolling. They can not be made with chip removal methods like cnc lathes. Most bolts you see will already fit this criteria but bigger bolts might be made with lathes
That and small batch titanium manufacturing
It will never be more efficient to 3D print a part that can be made via casting or injection molding. An injection mold takes seconds to make a part that would take a 3D printer many hours. It’s the old Swiss army knife problem. A purpose-built tool will always perform a task better than a general-purpose one.
Same reason why robots built to task are better than the scifi human shaped ones
wants to make.I’m thoroughly convinced those humanoid robots are just a way to bypass immigration law. The actual AI to run a robot like that in a domestic setting does not exist and will not for decades, if ever. Would you trust ChatGPT to run a robot, in your home, where your family lives? That’s how you end up with your baby in an oven when the damn robot mistakes it for a turkey.
All the tech demos for those robots are actually being live-piloted by human operators wearing haptic suits and VR headsets. They claim this is temporary, but it’s not. We already have doctors doing remote surgeries across the planet. If you can do brain surgery remotely, you can wash dishes remotely.
These robots are not going to be autonomous. They’re going to be deployed in rich countries, remotely piloted by people in poor countries. Workers in poor countries will telecommute to rich countries for menial labor jobs. The rich countries will get the benefits of immigrant labor without providing any of the benefits immigrants normally get. They won’t have a path to citizenship. Their children won’t get citizenship or education. They won’t get healthcare or income assistance benefits.
It seems absurd to go to all this trouble just for some domestic work, but it’s really not. Imagine you can save $10/hour on labor by using one of these robot systems piloted remotely by workers in low wage countries. Even if the robot costs $50k, if you can work them 12 hours per day, that $50k robot will pay for itself in 14 months.
This is also why the robots need to be humanoid. It takes time to train a pilot to remotely operate a robot with a very nonhumanoid shape. But a humanoid robot? You can take someone who never finished the 8th grade, hand them a haptic suit and a VR headset, and they’ll be able to pilot such a robot instantly. But any human without severe neurological illness, regardless of education or background, can safely operate a robot like this. You don’t need to know English or the intricacies of American culture to know that you shouldn’t put a baby in an oven. And if the robot does do something horrible, there’s a human on the other end you can hold responsible for its actions.
This is the critical application of these humanoid robots. We don’t have and may never have the AI to let these things run truly autonomously. Their real killer app is bypassing immigration law, taking advantage of immigrant labor, while offering the immigrants very little benefits beyond a meager wage.
As if all 3D printers and filaments aren’t made in China today.
Some very nice ones are made in the Czech Republic (out of Chinese parts)
They can also bring down the cost of air travel by killing all the sparrows causing birdstrike.
