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RE: [3D Printing] What Price Teaching Special Needs With Tactile Words?
that was a far better read than I was expecting about 3d printing. The prices really are very reasonable. I was shopping around to have a piece of PET cut to an odd shape and the cheapest I could find was like $60 just to do the cutting
The costs of creating bespoke parts have dropped a lot over the last 5 to 10 years – largely driven by the increasing availability of 3D printers for reasonable prices and, more surprisingly and less often talked about, the availability of home and small business CNC machines. Once upon a time, getting a custom piece milled was a really complicated endeavor, from the complexity of designing something purely by descriptive drawing through finding a machinist capable of reading those drawings and turning out a reasonable piece. The whole process was expensive because each individual part was expensive.
Cheap and available 3D design software has made communicating purely by drawing a thing of the past, and we're all better for it. Desktop CNC designs have given the ability to enter the market as a machinist to a lot of people who never would have considered doing so simply because they would have never had the opportunity to try.
soon enough we will all have star trek replicators