You never know where to expect the next 3D printed innovation, but this time it’s the kitchen and bathroom, where American Standard now provides a line of 3D printed faucets.
The company introduced the high-end products branded under their “DXV” line, which now includes a series of 3D printed metal faucets.
These faucets are stunningly beautiful and employ incredibly innovative design features. At first glance, they appear to be a fancy faucet, but upon closer inspection you’ll realize they are impossible faucets! There is no visible way for the water to travel to the spout.
Then you have to get very close and realize they’ve carefully designed the 3D print to be hollow. Water actually flows through the intricate and seemingly waterless structure to the spout.
It seems that American Standard has deftly adopted proper 3D printing design principles: design something that is not possible to manufacture in any other way.
3D printed design in this case permits the creation and manufacture of very small water channels throughout the structure. Just imagine trying to make this with conventional tools and you’ll quickly realize they’re onto something here, perhaps an entirely new genre of modern design enabled by 3D printing.
Here we see a faucet that looks conventional, but in fact is composed of many water channels that emerge at the spout. The limitations have been removed; any design is now possible.
Sure, we’re quite excited about this, but is there a downside? Yes, there is. It’s the price of these units. We don’t know the price for these pieces, but as they are each individually 3D printed in metal, followed by a manual finishing process, you can bet they’re priced in the multi-thousands of USD$ range.
But that’s ok with us, as faucets can be a very high-end product for which some folks will pay large amounts.
We just need someone to lower the price of metal 3D printing so more people can benefit from the new design approaches.
Via DesignBoom and DXV
