Fancy a new vase or some unbreakable crockery for that camping trip, but haven’t got time to go shopping? What about a replacement for the broken spoke on your spectacles or an individually designed heads for your golf clubs? Or, how about a scale model of that new sports car your kids designed or a mini objet d’art created from photos of a Henry Moore sculpture? The possibilities for 3D printing are limited only by your imagination and what someone could come up with in a 3D drawing package or with CAD software.
3D printing, rapid prototyping, as it is often known, is not new. I first heard about 3D printing sometime in late 1980s while still a student. However, these devices, which have featured in TV shows such as CSI, could soon be coming to a workshop near you and may represent the biggest shift in commerce and manufacturing in decades. The Fab@Home wiki has more information on the technology, but 3D printing, essentially, turns a digitized representation of a solid object, which you might download, email, or create, into a real solid object. It using a vat of uncooked starting material (plastic, metal or alloy) and a laser, or other device, controlled by computer holding the digitized information to build up the object layer by layer.
Source: www.sciencebase.com