Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Mr. Bowyer's Fantastic Machine is a rambly story by Giles Turnbull in The Morning News about a fantastic device that recalls Star Trek, but is real, now. Give it a pattern, and it can manufacture nearly anything, including itself. And there's one being made in Rhode Island.

It's a replicating rapid-prototyper. As it happens, yes, it is capable of replicating itself. But it's really a rapid prototyper. Like a printer: You tell it what shape to make, and it will make it. It looks a bit useless and weird, this collection of bits, but Adrian Bowyer has dedicated years of his life to it. And it has reached something of a milestone: it can fabricate all the parts needed to make a copy of itself. So in a manner of speaking, it self-replicates.

...Right now, if you had about $500 or $600 to spare (that's £300-ish to your mum and your friends), you could put one together yourself.

...He wants to do to the manufacturing industry what the MP3 file did to the music business. He wants to see a repped RepRap in every home, making... things. Things for people to use. He wants RepRaps themselves to grow, to thrive, to rep and morph and fab themselves into new ideas, new machines--all of them making stuff for people. Stuff that today, we get manufactured in a distant country, shipped across the globe in a metal crate, and sold to us in soulless malls. Adrian Bowyer wants an end to all that. A new way of life.

He sees a sci-fi future for us, one in which goods are manufactured in a kitchen cupboard while you sleep, one in which your RepRap is connected to the Web and has a menu of items for you to make--something a bit like the iTunes Music Store, perhaps. You tap an icon for the thing you want, then wait for it to appear.

I went looking for the docs. RepRap has a Web site. "Wealth without money..." is its motto. Yes, this is a disruptive technology.

The primary goal of the RepRap project is to create and to give away a makes-useful-stuff machine that, among other things, allows its owner cheaply and easily to make another such machine for someone else.

Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

That's Dr Adrian Bowyer BSc(Eng) PhD CEng CMath CSci ACGI MBCS FIMA FRSA, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Bath University.

The RepRap site is overstuffed with documentation, explanation, philosophy and a spirit of communal development. RepRap is open-source hardware -- it has to be: Were Dr. Bowyer to sell his invention, he could only sell one.

There you can download the plans to make the first version, pictured below: How to build RepRap 1.0 "Darwin"

A second, more advanced version, dubbed Mendel, is in development.

Since the engineering in the RepRap forums is beyond me, I went to the "Things to Print" section, "What do you want to build with your RepRap?"

Some are modest (paintball gun) but the most active and serious discussion centers on a Fresnel-type solar collector [STLs included].

A Google map pinpoints the location of people building RepRaps. One is Bruce Wattendorf of Mapleville, a village in Burrillville.

Bruce made a presentation at AS220 in May. Here's the video:

I emailed Bruce last night.

He replied,

I have a running machine that I have approximately been able to replicate 1/3 of the parts. I also have made my machine out of wood.

My son who is 12 and I have made the machine.

We have also been involved in the development of the future electronics for the printer.

Our blog is http://repstrapping.blogspot.com/

I would love to answer any more question you have and am interested in showing the machine.

I'm interested in seeing it. If you have questions for Bruce, leave them in comments and I'll ask them when we meet.

There's much more detail about RepRap at Wikipedia.