It looks like a bakery. A warm glow emanates from the windows of big, oven-like machines, and a dusting of white powder covers everything.
This space in an anonymous building in New York’s Long Island City neighbourhood, just across the river from Manhattan, isn’t cooking up breads and pastries, however. It’s a factory, filled with 3-D printers “baking” items by blasting a fine plastic dust with lasers.
When a production run is done, a cubic foot (0.0283 cubic meters) of white dust comes out of each machine. Packed inside the loose powder like dinosaur bones in sand are hundreds of unique products, from custom iPhone cases to action figures to egg cups.
Manufacturing is coming back to New York, but not in a shape anyone’s seen before. The movement to take 3-D printing into the mainstream has found a home in one of the most expensive cities in the US
New York’s factories used to build battleships, stitch clothing and refine sugar, but those industries have largely departed. In recent years, manufacturing has been leaving the US altogether. But 3-D printing is a different kind of industry, one that doesn’t require large machinery or smokestacks.
“Now technology has caught up, and we’re capable of doing manufacturing locally again,” says Peter Weijmarshausen, chief executive of Shapeways, the company that runs the factory in Long Island City.
