What capabilities does it need?

GP's point was why do we need new designs when company X already has a proven design. Well I can't access that design; it isn't published. My factory has cleanrooms, CNC tools, presses, waterjet cutters, testing equipment, and more, and a lot of flexibility and is presently running well below capacity. But I can't even assess whether that tooling is sufficient to make that design.

The open source designs do at least solve this problem.

Injection molding - The TOP thing we need to get mass manufacturing going. I just watched NYTimes front page video of Georgia Tech students trying to 3D print their way - it is unbelievably naive to use 3D printing in a situation that needs thousands and hundreds of thousands of parts. It defies common sense and elevates 3D printing to a new buzzwordy things by the media.

Do you have injection molding tools and mold making expertise?

While it is very obviously suboptimal, I don't see why 3D printing should be dismissed entirely in situations like the current one.

The point is that we have thousands of these 3d printing machines distributed around the world, with a good amount of source material. At this point, we can afford to brute-force our way to producing hundreds of thousands of items, don't we?

This is not going to solve all our manufacturing needs, not even by a long shot, but it seems it could fill very specific critical and unexpected needs.

It's an opportunity cost. If we allocate resources that can otherwise be put to a better use, why not? Efficiency is king in mass production.

By all means, use 3D printing at hospital level to get things made that's needed. A parts of the face shield (such as the head band) can be locally manufacturered using 3d printers.

But it is boggling to me that the media keeps wanting to get 3D printing buzzword clicks than actually asking manufacturing engineers.

3D printing becomes more viable as people use it. Right now it is pretty niche, but many groups are doing it on an industrial scale.

If every household or building had one, the parts could be crowdsourced from every machine that could make them.

The difference between where 3D printing and injection molding technology is right now is that 3D printers have scaled down in size and cost to the point of consumers being regular folks.

As for right now, 3D printing can help but it won’t be the savior of mankind.

Yet

Is there no such thing as a chain of custody for parts manufacturing? Crowd sourcing plastic parts from printers seems beyond naive. Do you know what goes into design of plastic molds or the repeatability and tolerances required? How do you quality control parts created from layers of hot glue? Plastic molded parts can rely on fundamental chemical understanding and tuned parameters of a molding machine.

> Well I can't access that design; it isn't published.

Apparently thats not true:

"I really don't get this DIY respirator hype. I get the idea, but why does everyone seem to reinvent the wheel using their "fancy" 3D printers and arduinos?!

This is 70s 80s tec, all patents expired. There are literally pages of exploded view drawings: http://www.frankshospitalworkshop.com/equipment/ventilators_...

Source: https://twitter.com/FauthNiklas/status/1242064388300947456

Patents and service manuals are not designs. They are just symbolic representations to illustrate the principles of operation. For manufacturing you need exact dimensions and tolerances for every part.

And the tolerance stackup is what makes it both expensive and reliable.

A whole lot of people are going to get a simple introduction into why some things are expensive.

Exactly. This is like handing someone a published API and asking why they can't just compile and run it.

Patents and service manuals are most of what you need to start reinventing the wheel. They're what you hand your R&D staff as you start reverse-engineering something, learning along the way all the little tricks that make it harder than it looks. They're not what you hand your machine shop and start producing.