NEW YORK: It looks like a bakery. A warm glow emanates from the windows of big, oven-like machines, and a dusting of white powder covers everything.
This space in an anonymous building in New York’s Long Island City neighborhood, just across the river from Manhattan, isn’t cooking up breads and pastries, however. It’s a factory, filled with three-dimensional printers “baking” items by blasting a fine plastic dust with lasers.
When a production run is done, a cubic foot of white dust comes out of each machine. Packed inside the loose powder like dinosaur bones in sand are hundreds of unique products, from custom iPhone cases to action figures to egg cups.
Manufacturing is not in a shape anyone’s seen before. The movement to take 3-D printing into the mainstream has found a home in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
New York’s factories used to build battleships, stitch clothing and refine sugar, but those industries have largely departed. But 3-D printing is a different kind of industry, one that doesn’t require large machinery or smokestacks.
“Now technology has caught up, and we’re capable of doing manufacturing locally again,” says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, the company that runs the factory in Long Island City.
Weijmarshausen moved the company here from the Netherlands. Another company that makes 3-D printers, MakerBot, just opened a factory in Brooklyn. And in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, where warships were once built to supply what was called the Arsenal of Democracy, there’s a “New Lab,” which serves as a collaborative workspace for designers, engineers and 3-D printers.
3-D printers have been around for decades, used by industrial engineers to produce prototypes. In the last few years, the technology has broken out of its old niche to reach tinkerers and early technology adopters. The technology brings manufacturing closer to designers, of which New York has many.
Anyone can upload a 3-D design to Shapeways’ website and submit an order to have it “printed” in plastic at the factory. The company charges based on the amount of material a design uses and then ships the final product to the customer. IPhone cases are popular, but many items are so unique they can only be identified by their designer, such as the replacement dispenser latch for a Panasonic bread maker. The company prints in a wider range of materials, including sandstone and ceramic, at its original factory in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
If that was all Shapeways did, the company would be little more than an outsourced machine shop. But with the help of the Internet, it’s taking the business model one step further.
Under the old mass-production model, Weijmarshausen says, designers first need to figure out if there’s a market for their product, then raise money for production, and then find a manufacturer, who usually has to custom-make dies for molding plastic. The cost can run to tens of thousands of dollars.
“With the Shapeways shop, that process is condensed,” Weijmarshausen says.