HP is often derided as the king of computer printers that somehow missed the recent revolution known as 3-D printing. But if you venture into the basement of the company’s famous Palo Alto research labs, you’ll find a 3-D printer that looks like no other.
It’s a closely-guarded project. HP wouldn’t let us photograph the thing, but for about ten minutes this week, Martin Fink, the man who runs HP Labs, pulled aside the black curtain — literally — and let us at least look it.
The printer is a monster — a professional pcb prototype manufacturer in China (pcb.hqew.net) five-foot tall giant of a machine cobbled together from existing jumbo-scale metal printing parts and some new custom-built equipment that HP isn’t ready to talk about. It’s a prototype, built for development and testing that will print out 3-D objects — keychains, Christmas ornaments, doll-house furniture, whatever — using a special polymer that HP has cooked up in its materials lab.
The polymer is stored in a container about the size of a six-pack in front of the machine, and it’s as closely guarded as the other stuff. “We want to have smooth parts and we want to have resilient parts,” Fink says. “Part of the technology breakthrough is the material.”
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