3-D Printing is moving quite quickly. Where I used to work we had a machine that printed by impregnating a layer of powder with glue to build up the image. It cost about 30k pounds a few years ago but can now be bought for about 12k. There are a number of different processes - powder, laying down a thin stream of plastic, laying plastic down a layer at a time and so on. There is an open source printer that you can make yourself called Reprap, although you may need a bit of computer savvy to run it. When I last looked at it you needed a Linux computer to drive it. And you probably need some sort of 3-D CAD which can output in STL format. It is interesting, though usually pretty boring to watch. I made some 1/48th scale missiles to hang on an aircraft kit before I retired. They are trying to get people to call it additive printing now for some reason.
Jerry
