CASE STOUT The Nearly Instant Snowboard Three-dimensional printing has been around since the 1980s. The price and quality finally became practical for small-business and personal use. These printers work much like a desktop printer, only instead of ink, they eject plastic, wax, paper. titanium, gold, or one of a large number of other materials in very fine layers that build up to form a three-dimensional object. More and more businesses are using 3-D printing for design and manufacture. Burton Snowboards in Burlington, Vermont, uses 3-D printing to design new snowboards. This change has dramatically cut the time needed for developing a new board from two years to one year. Moreover, the technology prints out a prototype of the new board that can be held and examined from every perspective. It can even be ridden down a snow slope and checked out for performance characteristics. When the snowboard doesn't quite come out as hoped, the designers can go back to their computers, tweak the design, and print out a revised version. In the past. the company designed the board first, then devoted time and resources to tooling up a production line to produce a working prototype, and only then could they actually test the board. A few years ago. a rider had an idea for adding a wing" to a snowboard. Burton created a design for the idea, printed out a prototype, and handed it over to the rider for a test ride the next day. This design and development technology produces cost savings in other ways, too. For example, instead of waiting until production can manufacture a finished board for use in marketing and advertising materials. the photographers may now work with the 3-D prototype. The catalog and other promotional materials are ready to go even before the production line starts rolling out the new snowboards, producing faster sales and earlier delivery dates Case Study Review 1. Analyzing How can 3-D printing enable Burton to develop better boards than more traditional methods? 2. Speculating Think about the implications of 3-D printing. How might this technology affect the broader U.S. economy as it becomes more widely used? Save