We Throw Away a Lot of Perfectly Good Stuff

A washing machine can have a perfectly good motor, electronics, pump, drum, wiring and everything else that actually makes it a washing machine. Then one little plastic clip breaks. Now it’s broken. Not broken in the normal sense. The machine still works. It just needs a piece of plastic that weighs half an ounce and probably cost pennies to make. So you look up the part. It isn’t available. Or even better, the manufacturer sells it, but only as part of a $240 assembly containing fifteen other things you don’t need. At some point we apparently decided this was normal. It’s not.

Mass manufacturing is incredibly efficient. If you need a million identical plastic parts, injection molding is hard to beat. You make a mold, run the parts, put them into products, and ship them all over the world. The problem comes ten years later. Nobody wants to maintain tooling, inventory and warehouse space for some tiny bracket used in an appliance they stopped making in 2018. That decision makes complete sense for the manufacturer. It makes considerably less sense when you own the appliance. The result is a weird situation where the vast majority of a product can still be perfectly usable, but one unavailable component effectively totals the whole thing. Cars have the same problem. So do tools, commercial equipment, RVs, electronics, furniture and just about anything else with molded plastic parts.

I own a 3D printing company, so obviously I think 3D printing is useful. But I’m not particularly excited about printing another plastic dragon. There are enough of those. What I find interesting is making something that you cannot buy. A bracket broke. A clip disappeared. A manufacturer discontinued a part. You need an adapter that nobody makes because apparently you’re the only person on Earth trying to connect those two things. That is where 3D printing gets useful very quickly. You don’t need 10,000 parts. You need one. And making one is exactly where traditional manufacturing starts getting very expensive and digital manufacturing starts making a lot of sense.

A lot of people assume you need the original CAD file to reproduce a part. You usually don’t. If the original part is available, even if it is broken, you can often measure it and recreate the geometry. Sometimes there’s enough information left to figure out what the missing section looked like. Sometimes the new version can actually be improved. Maybe the original was too thin in one spot. Maybe a mounting tab needs reinforcement. Maybe the manufacturer optimized the part to save three cents when it was being produced by the million. When you only need one replacement, those constraints change. That is one of the really strange advantages of making parts individually.

This is where 3D printing people occasionally lose the plot. Just because you can print something doesn’t mean you should. Some parts should be machined. Some should be molded. Some should be made from metal. Some are safety critical and should not be reverse engineered by somebody with a ruler and excessive confidence. The question isn’t whether something can technically be 3D printed. The question is whether 3D printing is a good manufacturing process for that particular part. For a lot of low-volume plastic components, the answer happens to be yes.

We spent decades building supply chains around moving physical replacement parts from factories to warehouses to distributors to stores. For common parts, that works great. For uncommon parts, it gets expensive fast. 3D printing changes the equation because the replacement doesn’t necessarily have to sit on a shelf waiting for somebody to need it. It can just be made when somebody needs it. That feels like a much more sensible way to handle a part that might only be needed fifty times a year. And as more products get older, more manufacturers discontinue parts, and more people realize they don’t actually need to replace an entire machine because a plastic tab snapped off, I think we’re going to see a lot more of this.

If you’re in Raleigh and something expensive is about to get thrown away because one dumb plastic part broke, send us a picture of it. Seriously. Maybe we can make it. Maybe we can’t. If 3D printing is the wrong solution, we’ll tell you. But replacing a whole appliance, tool or machine because of a tiny piece of unavailable plastic seems like a pretty good problem to at least try solving first. That’s the kind of 3D printing we’re interested in.