"greenaum" wrote in message
...

On Sat, 18 Sep 2010 01:36:04 -0400, JF Mezei
sprachen:

Perhaps NASA might be able to develop a cost effective way to
manufacture large carbon-carbon parts and make a shuttle belly out of a
dozen carbon-carbon panels instead of thousands of tiles.

I realise this is nearly a year old, but Usenet's not what it used to
be...

The latest New Scientist is a bit of a special on 3D printing /
"additive manufacturing". At the moment, it's based round spreading a
layer of powder, and using lasers / electron beams to melt the powder
together, sintering it into solid parts. You do one layer, then spread
some more powder for the second layer. After a while, you end up with
a big pile of powder with a 3D object hidden in it.

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There was an article in a magazine (Wired?) about eight years or so ago. It
mentioned the possibility of using 3D printers to build laptop computers. It
said the first one might cost $1 billion, but after that it would drop to
$15.

Has their been any progress in this recently? Are we close to being able to
print modern computers with 3D printers?

Rep Rap looks neat, but the printers are limited to making simple plastic
toys, nothing even remotely close to a laptop computer.