Old car fans, you want this. Trust me

I should have said, ignore the ad at the start. It's worth the wait.

Steve

Are Jay Leno and Jeremy Clarkson from the same lardy genetic genepool?

Last year I had in my hand a working model rear car differential that had been printed in plastic, very clever stuff...

ISTR the US military have been using similar ideas to make spare parts out on the battlefield for there equipment. I thought they could actually ''print'' in metal and avoid the plastic rapid prototype stage?

Julian.

Self repairing plane mid flight?

I heard that too. A large truck mounted metal printer that had a huge database of parts and made them to order by sintering (sp?) a large vat of raw materials layer by layer, just like the plastic 3-D printers but hotter.

Supposed to save some huge amount of money logistics wise, for the parts that sintered alloy was strong enough for.

Here you go... the current generation and the next:

Blimey, they've invented CNC milling!

...for the current generation 8^P

Keep reading - laser sintering for the next generation (and that's an old article..)

Yup, they haven't made it yet, at some time they can manage to replicate investment casting :-) It's not a bad idea but it's close to being a solution looking for a problem, at 3.5cu in per hour then you could vastly improve your supply chain or use almost any other technology for most things. It's hardly suprising Rover went bust if they where using their R&D printing machine to make 1800 of something, you'd almost believe that every subcontracter they used had put them on stop & it was the only way of getting them.