Rep rap; new technology

You know how you can now browse and order virtually everything you wish for on line now; it’s all great until you remember that going to the checkout part of the website doesn’t actually make the goods appear immediately in your house; you realise it means you have to wait a week or so for the dubious pleasure of staying in for a whole day between 8 am and 7 pm in the desperate hope that the delivery man will actually deign to bless you with a visit… well that wait might be over…

The rep rap http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page is a 3 d printer; instead of printing ink, it prints liquid plastics in 1 mm layers, which soldifies when its hit the ‘paper’. The ‘paper’ it prints onto drops down a millimeter with each pass, so the ‘print’ gradually builds up to form a 3d object. Cool Hah?

Even cooler is that it’s been designed so that it can print all the component parts of another rep rap printer; so if you have one rep rap you can print an entire new one (it’s child) which when you assemble it can then print another one (the grandchild of the original printer).

With time you may be able to order shoes, they will be printed to your chosen size, colour scheme and design; download washing machines, computers, and -gasp- robots that bring us cocktails whilst we lounge under the twin suns of a planet in the gamma quadrant…

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