Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer

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Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity?

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It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video below. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”

The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year.

If you can dream it, and if you can create a 3D representation of it in an STL file, a desktop 3D printer can create it in a few hours. Provided it’s small enough, that is: The Replicator can only create objects smaller than 300 cubic inches, or about the size of a loaf of bread. Not quite big enough to assemble a cotton gin or a replacement plough blade, but certainly large enough to make toys, chess pieces, gears, artwork, cups, bowls, and a lot of other things.

“This is kind of magic, because there was nothing there, and now there’s something,” said Pettis.

Also, unlike the Star Trek Enterprise’s replicator, MakerBot can only create things in inedible ABS plastic or biodegradable PLA, so it won’t be able to make you a cup of tea — Earl Grey, hot. Sorry.

Still, 3D printers are making a whole new field of creativity accessible to computer geeks. In the same way that laser printers enabled people with computers to become publishing experts in two dimensions, these printers are opening the doors to creative, computational expression in three dimensions.

I’ve been fascinated with the “do-it-yourself” movement since I went to my first Maker Faire. Subsequently I investigated the growing world of hackerspaces, where people gather to work on code, learn how to solder, teach crocheting classes, borrow a welder, slice things into strips with a bandsaw, use a drill press, or work on projects that involve all of the above skills. The MakerBot emerges from this world, as Pettis was one of the telegenic evangelists of the DIY ethic and is a cofounder of NYC Resistor, one of the earliest U.S. hackerspaces.

I’m convinced that the people who have embraced the DIY movement have tapped into the core of what makes the United States great: Self-reliance, experimentation, innovation and a non-dogmatic reverence for facts. Over the decades, innovators tinkering in metaphorical (or literal) garages have played important roles in the development of electricity, radio, computers and, now, the internet economy.