Manitunc
That production point depends on the cost of the tooling or molds required for other processes. However, that tooling or mold is required whether you build 10 or 10 thousand and can be prohibatively expensive to prototype, which is really the purpose of 3d printing,
The point here is that you can perhaps use drawings for existing or modified parts to input into the computer, but there is an equivalent to tooling costs in that the more complex the shape the longer it takes to design the part in order to get the information into the computer.
I am familiar with modelling and prototyping techniques, and the advantage of 3D printing (and laser cutting, and CNC machining generally) is that because nowadays almost all products are designed on computer it is possible to extract from the drawings enough information to quickly see what a product will look like with regard to its external dimensions, but to integrate all the various drawings of all the parts is a bigger task.
Peterayer
there are some complex shapes and sectional changes in the arm tube interior that are not possible to produce by other methods.
That would be the advantage - by incorporating webs, coaxial tubes, and varying wall thickness it would be possible to alter dimensions to increase strength and rigidity without adding to effective mass, while reducing resonance. What it appears is that the original drawings have been tweaked, rather than a new concept considered based on the technology. Which is fair enough, and a reasonable starting point.
J
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