Printing a bicycle with a 3D printer

Sure, you can print a bicycle on a 3-D copier! - but will it work when you try to ride it?

British engineers Chris Turner and Andy Hawkins take up a challenge to build a bike by using a 3-D copier. Their Airbike is made entirely of nylon – yes nylon – but it is supposedly as strong as steel. Although most printing is done using a plastic-like polymer, 3-D printing is now being done in many other media, including metal and glass.

Although the Airbike is just a prototype, the possibility of making custom bikes or simply printing spare parts (or upgrading!) when one needs replacement is intriguing. Musicians are already playing with the idea of customizable guitars, where one downloads open source specs and uses them to print custom parts on a home 3-D printer. One can imagine a vibrant online community will like soon exist, where people will offer now designs and tweak each others design ideas electronically.

Autodesk has a full-sized printed motorcycle in its San Francisco Design Gallery, however  the chopper is  printed with the considerably less hardy  material frequently used for prototyping.  Autodesk, maker of the ubiquitous AutoCAD software is a big player in the  growing 3-D printing market, leading the market in design software for the emerging technology and even planning to open Kinkos-like 3-D printing retail outlets shortly. Home 3-D copiers should be available soon as printers are already being tested for mass marketing to the home consumer market in Europe.

Full-sized printed motorcycle with working gears,
 courtesy Autodesk Design Gallery (Occupy San Francisco in background)