Is your household experiencing a dearth of molded-plastic accessories? Then you might be interested in the possibilities promised by soon-to-be-affordable three-dimensional printers:

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years.

“We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model,” he said. “The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials.”

Others are working on the same idea.

“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”

I admit the concept of downloading a design off Mattel and baking up your own action-figure model is kinda cool.

But the wider applications seem pretty pie-in-the-sky. It makes sense that you would be able to easily “print” a replacement battery cover for your cellphone. But would a homemade replacement actually fit? We’re talking about fairly exacting precision molding to get interlocking parts to work together; a tiny imperfection can screw it up.

Plus, look at how long it took the traditional paper-printing business to address something so fundamental as correctly printing Web pages. Figure it’ll take at least as long — some ten years and more — for 3D printing to work out the kinks. I doubt consumers are going to wait around for that.