My EcoJet supercar needed air-conditioning ducts. We used plastic parts we designed, right out of the 3D copier. We didn’t have to make these scoops out of aluminum, plastic is what they use in a real car.
Yes the title doesn't mention that molds are made as well but I would say the title is correct.
Leno has this thing about bashing 'machinists', I've heard him rant about that before.
At the end of the day a machinist can only make what you spec, if you spec it wrong you end up paying and you'll have to do it again. Measure twice, cut once.
To be fair, the car he made the duct for did have a jet engine :).
Aerospace CNC work is amazing stuff, it's not rare to see a block of aluminum be reduced to less than 5% of its starting weight as a finished part, the rest is scrap.
All the scrap gets recycled, a typical price for a pound of 'dirty' scrap is $0.09. Contrast that with $.70 for a pound for stock (and more expensive if it is a special grade or shape).
Printing is an additive process, milling is a subtractive process.
If the 'printer' would be used to directly make a functional car part (I don't care if it is made of some high grade plastic, as long as it is used directly in a load bearing situation) that would be revolutionary, this is just a rich guy playing with his toys bashing a profession that he hasn't a clue about.
Machinists the world over would cringe if someone said 'if they make the wrong part you still have to pay for it', that should read 'if you spec the wrong part you end up paying for it', there is a huge difference there.
Now, of course, Jay Leno has buckets of money to throw around to hire professionals and get professional level equipment, but he's got a point that this stuff is coming down in price all the time and that it is disruptive.
No disrespect to machinists, but getting all the measurements right is non-trivial. Letting people take 3D models, either scanned or CAD'ed and then use sub-millimeter accurate automated tools to create the parts is huge.
The parts that are being replaced were engineered to a certain spec, you can't just come along with your 3D printer and 'print' a copy of the original shape in a different material than the original and expect it to work long or safe.
I agree that getting all the measurements is non-trivial, but the way to use that data is to then send it to a milling machine to recreate an exact copy (not just shape, also material grade).
Sub millimeter accuracy will not do it for real parts, you'd have to go down to about 0.01 mm for anything beyond the trivial.
Machinists and their gear routinely achieve such accuracies in an enormous variety of materials.
Rapid prototyping, fine. Checking shape for fit, also fine. But to suggest that you can 'print' working parts with the same characteristics as machined parts from a 3D printer after scanning a machined original right now is simply not true, and to suggest that such a one-off is cost effective is really nonsense.
But it quite possibly will be true at some point in the future.
For the future of machining have a look at http://www.emachineshop.com/ , that's what I call disruptive.
Emachineshop is a giant step in the right direction and they have been around for a long time, so they get points for being early, but they are only a part of the picture.
Check out http://www.cnczone.com thousands of people making Automation and sharing manufacturing knowledge.
It's a tool in the chain, not a one-step scan-print have a usable car part process.
They could have sent out the original to make a mold of or they could have made a precise casting of it and then reversed that for a positive.
This looks like a great excuse to use a cool tool. Any competent machinist could turn out that nut in 1/2 the time it would take to scan/print it. And if you have access to a CNC rig (and most machine shops have 4 or 5 axis workcenters) you could make as many of them as you wanted once you had the shape programmed.
For a one-off a mold is a crazy process anyway, the only reason molds are used is if it is impossible to machine something (rarely) or to save cost in higher volumes (the most common case).
The reason "People say, “Why not just give the part to your machinist to make?” Well, if the machinist makes it wrong, you still have to pay for it." is absolute nuts, if you give a machinist (a competent one) a part to duplicate you'll be hard pressed to tell it from the original if you haven't marked it in some way.