Last month Home Depot the department super store for all your hardware needs announced a strategic partnership with Makerbot 3D printers. While this might seem like insignificant news to the snowboarding world, it actually marks a turning point in the do it yourself culture that has helped drive innovation in snowboarding.
The future of DIY binding repair?
3D printing isn’t anything new. Burton has had one in their prototype facility Craig’s for years. What is new is that these are now being made readily available to the consumer market. Currently Home Depot has chosen select cities to host Makerbot printer demonstrations in store and has them available on their website.
Cost is still going to be a barrier to entry for most hobbyists as the basic model costs just shy of $1,400 and the bigger model is $2,899.00. What this does offer though for those that aren’t put off by the price is a faster way to get prototypes made. Instead of having to source out a third party company to do this or find a way into an academic institution mechanics lab they can purchase a printer and get right to work on their designs.
Now imagine the possibilities of a 3D printer coupled with a 3D scanner. You can suddenly scan in your already existing binding and start tweaking the design of it. For example lets say you want more flex on the outside of your high back, you take yours off scan it in, tweak the flex points on the highback inside the design program and then print it off and you have a working prototype. Although I will note that the current level of plastics available for consumers are not going to be as strong as what manufacturers are using in their injection molded bindings. Also at this time there are only two plastic choices PLA and ABS with each having their own set of pros and cons.
Could you make a binding? Yes. Would it last a whole season? That’s highly debatable, but for prototyping tests this is a huge possibility.
Now on the other side of the do it yourself movement is the potential for shops to get in on this. Have you ever gone up riding and broken one of those obscure plastic parts to your binding that is 100% specific to the model you ride? I think everyone has at some point or another. So after you realize your day is having a rough patch because of this you trek down to the repair shop or local snowboard shop to get the part you need, only problem is they don’t have it, or they have something that will kind of work. Well imagine if they could just make you that new part right on the spot? This is a possibility and with Amazon now entering the 3d design market. The potential for companies to sell the schematics for these miniscule pieces is there. Then there’s the whole open source design movement that exists as well which could also expand on parts or over all binding designs.
As I previously mentioned the cost barrier is currently high, but with all new technology as more of it becomes readily available the costs will drop. This article on Bloomberg.com gives some insight from Makerbots CEO Bre Pettis and others on how in the future we will see more 3d printers in households.
For any do-it-yourselfers out there that have tinkered with the idea of binding construction, do you feel this is a viable option for you to test out?
3 Comments
[…] this? For those that want a little more perspective here's a shameless plug to an article I wrote. 3D Printing and the Future of Do It Yourself Snowboarding Innovation « But if you want other links I can post up the ones to Bloomberg and what not as well. […]
It could be a viable option in the future, but 3D printing still has some ways to go. The parts I 3D printed in plastic for Quick Flip Technology were very fragile, which is why I had to drop a lot of money to get a CNC machined aluminum prototype. The way the printed parts are made is through layering, and the layering makes it weak.
By the way, I spent less than $200 getting all my plastic printing done by a third party, which is still over $300 less than the cheapest 3D printer on the market. That also cuts out the costs of “ink” and computer software to run the printer.
In my opinion, getting your own plastic printer is a bit impractical right now when you can order parts elsewhere and have them arrive in less than a week for significantly cheaper.
On the other hand, Chase Kaczmarek (inventor and founder of Wheel Shields for longboards) would probably disagree with me because he went through way more prototypes than I did for his invention. The parts he needed were also larger, so material and machining costs were higher.
Bottom line is that it really depends on the project and the inventor.
Angry,
I’m an aspiring snowboard builder and a mechanical engineer by trade and just happened to stumble across your wonderful website. I feel that I may be able to weigh in on this article as we have three 3D printers in house at the company I work for and I have used 3D printing extensively for prototyping. As Matt stated, 3D printed parts, in most cases, are too brittle to be used in a binding application as of right now, but that is changing as I write this response. I attended Solidworks World this year (a convention for Solidworks CAD software and engineering innovators) and there, there was a company showing off their new carbon fiber 3D printer. I had the opportunity to play with a few carbon fiber printed parts and that proved to me that carbon fiber 3D printing definitely could be the future of additive manufacturing in applications such as binding repair. 3D printed carbon fiber parts are light weight and have more strength than their injection molded counterparts. That being said the modulus of elasticity of carbon fiber is going to be much higher than that of any injection molded binding plastic so carbon fiber would not replicate the flexing mechanics of the original part. Anyways just thought I’d throw my $0.02 in there. Enjoy the spring shred if there’s still any snow where you are!