Wednesday, April 9, 2014

I Made That! - A Bit on 3D Printing



The age of 3D printing is upon us.  We used to manufacture solid objects, now we print them.  Printing no longer means just words on paper, it means objects with three dimensions.  We print in plastic, some colleges and labs print in metal (printed metal parts are now used in Boeing airplanes), and one company is attempting to print a liver from live human cells.  By the end of 2014, the world will see the first printed human organ, a liver.

The head of our 3D club printed a part for a dishwasher that had broken.  It worked.  The MakerBots (produced by Stratasys) can be tricky to work with, I’ve managed to mess up mine at school three or four times, but when it works, it’s rewarding to think I designed this!  Plus, you can say, “I made that.”  I printed a set of chain links and carried them around for the rest of the day (they became my good luck charm, until I lost them).  A friend is printing a 3D chess set, another a phone case with spinning gears, another a toy car with working wheels, and I am printing a plastic dragon.  Here’s a printed phone case:



No, I did not print this, but we are in the process of printing one just like it.  The gears actually spin!

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