TLG and 3D Printing

[Creatorman]

We all know LEGO prototypes with 3D printing, but when I was surfing the web when I found this.

Now, to be honest, I get why LEGO doesn't want to distribute through 3D printing yet, but as an evolving technology, could you see this taking the place of buying from a store? How would this affect LEGO and the consumer? Would this hinder LEGO?

I, for one, can see this being used to help improve the replacement parts service. Imagine trying to get a retired piece, for a certain set now. Without printing, you may have to buy from the secondary market, but if LEGO had 3D printing, we could get replacement parts printed from a computer file.

Granted, it is not 3D printing is not perfect at the moment, but I am sure that by 10 years, it's quality may rival molded plastics.

What do you is your guys' opinion and why?

[autorazr]

To produce pieces with printing and enough structural integrity (at an affordable price) seems way way way off. I personally don't want or need a mini lego factory in my home. We have a 3D printer where I work, not a super awesome one mind you, but a decent one. The quality of prints is very poor and the frustration of printing is very high. Most prints come out wrong or fail altogether. To print a very small object at high quality (no visible texture) takes hours. My guess is by the time this tech becomes available and easy enough to use, Lego will have figured out a way to profit from it.

[Faefrost]

I think we have a good number of years before this becomes a thing. And even then finished product merchants such as Games Workshop have a far greater exposure to home 3d printing than Lego does. I don't think you will be printing out your own Lego sets anytime soon. But there will be some huge possibilities for unusual or custom elements. Something that Lego might do well to embrace. Not just allow but encourage hobbiests to design and trade new custom stuff like Hair or helmets. 3d printing has a long time before it can reproduce the levels of precision needed for Lego system elements such as bricks or core building pieces or the actual minifigs. But heck if Lego can actually develop a marketplace for creating and sharing or selling custom digital designs it could turn into a huge profit point. Think iTunes mixed with Team Fortresses Cash Shop hats. Say you wanted a 1930's Leather "New Yorker" style Fire Helmet to go with your Fire Brigade. You are skilled in 3d modelling so you put a design together. You then post it on Lego's Custom Design item shop for sale at $2. Lego does a brief validation of the design then posts it in their shop for sale. You get a cut. Lego takes a small cut. Everyone keeps buying quality ABS minifigures but you can now allow for direct user improvements.

[Creatorman]

To produce pieces with printing and enough structural integrity (at an affordable price) seems way way way off. I personally don't want or need a mini lego factory in my home. We have a 3D printer where I work, not a super awesome one mind you, but a decent one. The quality of prints is very poor and the frustration of printing is very high. Most prints come out wrong or fail altogether. To print a very small object at high quality (no visible texture) takes hours. My guess is by the time this tech becomes available and easy enough to use, Lego will have figured out a way to profit from it.

I'm taking an engineering class right now, and we also have one, a Makerbot, and while cool, I agree, the objects replicated are not the best quality, the plastics are brittle, and feel cheap, but, 3D printing is a rapidly changing industry, NASA did an experiment with it to make food, and stem cells. So of all things, LEGO seems like child's play.

But heck if Lego can actually develop a marketplace for creating and sharing or selling custom digital designs it could turn into a huge profit point. Think iTunes mixed with Team Fortresses Cash Shop hats. Say you wanted a 1930's Leather "New Yorker" style Fire Helmet to go with your Fire Brigade. You are skilled in 3d modelling so you put a design together. You then post it on Lego's Custom Design item shop for sale at $2. Lego does a brief validation of the design then posts it in their shop for sale. You get a cut. Lego takes a small cut. Everyone keeps buying quality ABS minifigures but you can now allow for direct user improvements.

Somehow that sounds like one of the applications of this in the future, something like CuuSoo, but for customizers. I honestly think that it would change the way customs are made. The only real problem is the fact that it might compete with customizers like Brickarms and Arealight. Also, designing would need a program like solidworks to check tolerances for quality control. But, it would be a great way to click with hobbyists.

[dr_spock]

It would be curious to see how the Intellectual Property plays out. It would be nice to print your own monorail tracks if LEGO don't plan to ever re-introduce them.

[weavil]

The only way they can make production quality prototypes is with a Laser 3D printer. They are not cheap in any way. But with a MakerBot type of 3D printer, they really isn't cheap enough model that can offset the cost of producing pieces to sell.

Laser 3D printing-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography

Regular 3D printing-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fused_deposition_modeling

Edited February 5, 2014 by weavil

[Dayton]

3D Printing takes a long time i am pretty sure. Also moulding is a lot faster and cheaper i am pretty sure about also.

[pbat]

Wasn't that issue already discussed here recently?

[Boxerlego]

My opinion is based on the current state with 3D printers are viewed as a prototyping place to develop. Sure there is a big difference in appearance and structure when it comes down to 3D printed parts and the LEGO parts. I would like to see a 3D printer that is able to work with a custom color filament where you can insert a custom color scheme that you can choose from a computer and inject that inside the 3D printed part where ever you want. I think the injection molding techniques are vastly superior to 3D printing when it comes to mass production.

[Creatorman]

Sorry to post on a topic that has been dead awhile, but I found this:

http://3dprint.com/1383/lego-awarded-3d-printing-patents-may-allow-users-to-print-own-bricks/

What do you guys think?

[AmperZand]

For now, the kinds of 3D printers that most people can afford can't produce LEGO quality parts. That will change eventually. TLG will, in due course, have to sell programs for the most popular 3D printers so that people who want to can produce official LEGO sets at home. It's analogous to music sales. At one point, you could only buy recorded music in a hard copy format: record or cassette and later CD. Now you have a choice of hard copy, e.g. CD, or soft copy, e.g. mp3 download.

I anticipate that there will always be demand for sets manufactured (not just designed by) TLG. There are some parents, kids and AFOLs who will just want to buy the finished product. But there are others, beginning with sets aimed at AFOLs, who will be happy downloading sets and producing the sets at home. I'm guessing that a secondary market will emerge of small companies that produce genuine TLG sets but manufactured on the secondary company's 3D printers. So there will be LEGO parts made by TLG but also official LEGO parts made by 3D printing companies.

Edited March 10, 2014 by AmperZand

[ShaydDeGrai]

I admit I'm a geek at heart and I really want 3D printing to succeed and become more commonplace, but based on my own experience thus far, I'm still waiting on the sidelines; if they want my money, the 3D printing industry in general, has to do better and they have a very long way to go before they're in danger of stealing business away from the injection molded toy industry.

I can certainly see 3D printing as a useful prototyping device internally, but not so much as a production or e-distribution tool. I played with a commercial 3D printer earlier this year to experiment with an idea I had for curve builder bricks and met with limited success. Of course the technology is always improving but in the near term my doubts are motivated by:

Production efficiency: compared to injection molding, 3D printing moves at a glacial pace. In the time it took me to print a single 1x2 brick, a commercial molding machine would have spat out thousands of bricks (assuming a mold that spits out a dozen or so positives per cycle.

Surface resolution: Every 3D printer I've ever worked with deposits media in thin layers to build up the shape. This results in side walls that aren't smooth. Now technically, the sidewalls of injection molding machines aren't perfectly smooth either; if you look at them with a really good microscope you'll see that look like the surface of an ice rink after a hockey game with little pits, scratches, swirls and bulges. By comparison, however, the sidewalls of printed parts look like the strata of the Grand Canyon with distinct layers and rocky outcroppings. Worse yet, it takes far less magnification to see the defects.

Good "mainstream" printers today will get you about as far as the "smoothness" of the side of a pad of Post-It Notes. Like toner printers and wax dye sublimation color printers before them, I'm sure that, over time, the resolution will go up and the price will come down, but the downside of a pure layer deposition model is that there will always be some sense of "strata" giving the part a "grain" - stronger in one plane than another, smoother in one plane than another.

When I tried printing parts, one of the problems I noted was that if I had two parts printed in the same orientation, say, along the plane of the studs, the unevenness of the sides of the stud caught on the unevenness of the tube and the inside wall of the brick. This resulted in excessive clutch power and, due to my grip strength and "Stubborn Scotsman" streak (as my wife puts it), more than a fair share of broken bricks as I cracked sidewalls and snapped off studs trying to get parts separated. Undersizing the studs helped, but then they didn't play well with real Lego and had a very Megabloks feel to them with too much tolerance in the system. I tried mixing orientations, printing one brick in a vertical plane and another in the horizontal and while that went a long way to solving the clutch problem, who needs the extra complication of needing to remember to alternate "grains" when stacking bricks.

For my prototypes I ended up with a combination of printing, sanding down the high spots, dipping in floor wax to fill up the low parts then burnishing with a soft toothbrush. This created useable parts that played well with each other as well as standard Lego, but it was far from the height of automation. As I said before, just printing one part took longer than it would have taken a factory to print thousands. If you add to that the amount of time it took me to manually finish off the parts, I think TLG could have produced the entire production run of Super Star Destroyers (and shipped them to the stores) faster.

Maybe someday someone will come up with a 3D printer that does more post processing (like using a tiny particle beam to sandblast the surface smooth so you're effectively printing a bigger part than you want and phase two shaves it down to the size you actually asked for) but unless there's a lot more demand and a lot more competition in the industry, I don't see this sort of technology being sold next to toasters and power drills at Target any time soon.

Cost: Speaking of selling this stuff at Target. 3D printers are cool and useful for serious hobbyists but compared with 2D printers, blenders, smartphones, etc. they've got a long way to go before they become mainstream consumer appliances. That means even low quality ones are pricey, and so are the supplies. Not counting the discards, I think my viable brick prototypes probably averaged about 40 cents a brick (significantly more if you also consider the amount of material I wasted in earlier prototypes and/or amortized the cost of the machine over the expected useful lifetime of the device against hours of operation producing the parts). Even at 40 cents as a low estimate, that's still more than ten times what a similarly sized standard part from TLG would have cost me to buy on Bricklink.

Color Matching: TLG has its own issues on that front, but unless they decide to get in the business of actually selling spools of "2014 Earth Green" ABS printing thread media, the rest of us don't stand much of a chance of making home-printed bricks blend in. I tried printing in white (too translucent) and black (better, but not as deep a black as TLG uses) and even my old eyes could spot the difference from across the room. I don't even know where I'd start if I had to come up with "sand green" or "dark reddish brown".

All that said, I do think there's a place for 3D printing in the future somewhere down the road. The technology is always improving and while the best tech will always be unrealistically priced, its mere existence will drive down the price of second-tier tech and widen adoption. By comparison, look at CNC (computer numerical controlled) Machines. When I was at university in the 1980's we had a CAD/CAM system that allowed us to design parts on a dedicated (ridiculously expensive) computer and send those designs to what was essentially a router on the end of a robot arm over an adjustable table. The CNC Machine would drill, route, and grind our designs out of a solid block of plastic or aluminum and we could walk out of the lab a few hours later with a new part that exactly matched our specification. I remember asking the guy who ran the shop about it at the time and he told me the university bought the system (the CAD mainframe, six workstations, two CNC machines and the software) used for half a million dollars (US) - that was real money 30 years ago. Jump to today (or technically, yesterday) and I have an ad in my email about a sale at my neighborhood woodworking shop, they're selling a decent CNC machine (with CAD software) for 1599 USD. Sure it only works on wood instead of aluminum and I have to make do with running the software on my existing laptop rather than having a dedicated workstation like I did back in the '80's, but $1600 down from 0.5M is a pretty good price drop and the modern device is easier to use and, despite being a third the size, can work on larger blanks. Still, it's a specialty tool. I know multiple woodworkers who live perfectly happy productive lives without one and I've never met a non-woodworker who felt compelled to buy one just because it was 'cool'.

3D printers will likely follow the same course. Resolution will improve, costs will come down, ease of use will go up, but I think the technology still has a long road ahead of it before a consumer goods company will blindly assume that enough people own enough machines of high enough quality to make catering to that audience a priority. Right now, the onus isn't on TLG or Hasbro or even Games Designers Workshop to support the 3D printing community, its on the printer manufacturers themselves. They are the ones who will have to take the lead to encourage people to discover what 3D printers can do and encourage people to share their designs (so that the printers they've already sold continue to eat printing supplies and keep enthusiasm for the technology alive). Without something like that, 3D printers will continue to dwell in geeks' basements, artist studios, labs and model railroad club-houses - a great thing to "have access to" on occasion, but not nearly ubiquitous like a microwave oven or TV.

Even today, 3D printing has its place. I had no problem making parts that played well with standard Lego for a single point of connection, it was only when I needed to actually build with them that the technology really fell flat. I could certainly see things like mini-figure accessories (tools, weapons, hair pieces, helmets, etc.), tile variations and other finials (inverted cheese slope anyone??) being viable on a good printer today for very low volume consumption. The official Lego parts will be smooth, and mating smooth to rough is far less problematic than mating rough to rough. I've found printed plastics to be a bit brittle, but I suppose that's something one could mitigate by just being more careful. Cost is still an issue, but in many cases the cost of postage to ship an actual part (especially in small quantities to remote locations) can go a long way to equalizing that playing field.

[AmperZand]

3D printers will likely follow the same course. Resolution will improve, costs will come down, ease of use will go up, but I think the technology still has a long road ahead of it before a consumer goods company will blindly assume that enough people own enough machines of high enough quality to make catering to that audience a priority.

I didn't mean to imply that 3D printing would revolutionise the production and distribution of LEGO in the near or even medium terms. I was thinking more in terms of years and decades. When the kids of today are themselves parents, I reckon that downloading TLG's latest set and producing the bricks at home, at the office or at a local 3D print shop will be commonplace.

[Faefrost]

We shall see what the future holds. The patents on SLS printing expired last month, making the tech fair game for innovation and consumerization. And that will be the equivalent of 3d "laser printing" vs FDM's inkjet.

I think we will need to see several major innovations in 3d printing before it has any direct home impact for us. Strength, speed, color injection not requiring multiple heads or material spools. Long before we see any "at home" benefits we will probably see TLG working to use newer faster devices not just in prototyping, but in production. At least in small scale production. Custom small run headpieces, etc. 3d printing will finally be the trick that will permit some new parts in CuuSoo. If they can get it where it can spit out 20,000 Legend of Zelda hairpieces in a fairly compact time frame, precolored, then we may see some evolutionary changes.