2016 Best of Digital Fabrication

By RAIN NOE From Core77

2016 was a great year for digital fabrication, with machines becoming smaller, cheaper and easier to use; technologies many of us could never dream of affording are starting to come within reach. Who’d have thought we’d ever see a desktop vacuum forming machine like the FormBox?

Or “Wazer’s Affordable Desktop Waterjet Cutter?”

CNC mills are typically bulky affairs that arrive on large delivery trucks. But Shaper changed the CNC game with the introduction of their handheld self-correcting router, the Origin.

We were amazed by the Origin–but wondered how practical it would be in daily use, and asked you for your input as well with “How Practical is the Shaper Origin Self-Correcting Router?” Turns out the company was listening, and they took the time to answer both our questions and yours with detailed video demonstrations.

This year we also saw established digital fabrication technologies being used in new ways. Finland-based Cajo Technologies blew us away with their laser that can burn different colors into different materials.

Students at TU Delft used multi-axis 3D printing, which “allows metals and resins to be printed mid-air in any direction without the need for support structures,” to create a functional bicycle frame.

The OLO 3D Printer cures resin using nothing more than the light from your smartphone. It snagged $2-million-plus on Kickstarter, and we saw some debate on the device in “The $99 3D Printer: a Pioneering Product or Design Misstep?”

Perhaps the most eye-popping–or teeth-correcting–digital fabrication story of the year was this one: New Jersey Institute of Technology design student Amos Dudley made a casting of his own teeth, 3D printed his own plastic braces and corrected his misaligned dentition!

One of the digital fabrication stories that we thought would be in the news this year, but which sadly was not, was the Glowforge laser cutter we wrote up in 2015. Despite racking up $28 million in crowdfunding over a year ago, the machine has yet to ship. Just a reminder that crowdfunding and attempting to mass produce new technologies is still a risky business.

Lastly, while digital fabrication is clearly the future, it’s worth remembering its place within manufacturing–and what human beings can still do better and faster than any machine. To see what we’re talking about, check out British clogger Jeremy Atkinson “Creating Complicated Shapes by Hand, Faster than a 3D Printer, Using Primitive Tools.”

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