Desktop Metal eyeglass hinges

This is the company behind the eyeglass-hinge case. Listed separately because the canonical cluster names them; the case-as-taught is the eyeglass hinge analysis.

Now let's go through what I skipped yesterday — a real-life example. This is a blog you can find on the web. There's a guy Don Nelson, who writes the Additive Report, a newsletter just about additive manufacturing. This is from about ten months ago. He's a science writer, and he learned that eyeglass hinges are a good additive manufacturing candidate. In a recent telephone interview with the CTO of an additive manufacturing company — [Tom holds up a quarter and an eyeglass hinge.] here's a quarter, and there's an eyeglass hinge made by powder bed fusion with a binder — and he says they can make forty-five thousand pre-assembled twelve by five by six millimeter eyewear hinges in a four-hour shift. Wow.

Tom's anchor case for additive manufacturing hype. Two years and $200M of research; best result is a million-dollar machine making 45,000 hinges/hour. Surface-roughness wear problem in the integrated hinge-pin design. Tom's critical-thinking refrain: "people are just in this for the money, and your grandmothers are going to pay for it."

Additive manufacturing, which is what we're supposed to be talking about, is a viable technology. But you should know by now that it's only in the aerospace sector. You're not going to start building auto wheels. Next week — it's not in the 11 rule things from Digital Alloys, but Desktop Metals, there's an article that I will go through where they came up — have I told you about the eyeglass hinges? Two years and two hundred million dollars worth of research, and the best thing they can come up with is, if they can make forty-five thousand eyeglass hinges per hour.