This really is cool where all the 3d printing tech is going. Well cool and scary as it will put a TON of people out of work long term. But the speed to market with new products is going to drastically increase.

To live in an age where what seemed like far-off Science Fiction in your childhood became a modern day reality is heartening but also more than a tiny bit surreal.

Its a long way off, but still a plan for major manufacturers. The challenge is controlling the microstructure of the material, i.e., the microcrystalline structure of the metal. There is a great deal of effort (and trial and error guesswork) that goes into controlling this using traditional production means. Controlling the microstructure from parts that are produced by printing opens a whole new set of challenges. 

To put this in perspective, we still don't fundamentally understand the fatigue of parts that are traditionally cast. The state-of-the art involves designing and creating the part, then testing it thoroughly, which takes upwards of 6 months. We can develop empirical expressions for the fatigue behavior. If we take the same part and change the heat treatment slightly, all of that empirical knowledge is now gone and the part becomes subject to retesting. As a species we've been studying fatigue in metals for over 150 years and have yet to understand it at a predictive level. 

The promise of the technique is great. I have two associates that work for John Deere that are interested in this. Their goal is to eliminate inventory. Presently there are warehouses of parts for all the machines that have been produced in the past (decades of machine parts). Rather than produce them, at cost, store them, and when needed ship to the repair sites, it would be much more convenient to print on demand. It would be ever greater if they could simply ship the data to a local printer at the repair shop where parts could be printed on demand, but I doubt this will happen anytime soon. There are engineering standard that need to be met that assures the safety and reliability of the parts produced.

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