Printing in 3D, no glasses necessary

Recently, a student at MIT designed and created a working flute using a 3D Printer.

Yes, you heard right – a musical instrument came out of a printer. It’s hard to imagine, but there have been such advances in 3D printing technology that today you can print clothing and food, even human tissue. And that is creating new opportunities for researchers, designers and business owners alike.

KALW’s Brian Pelletier has the story of one San Francisco company that’s hoping to capitalize on the 3D printing boom.

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BRIAN PELLETER: All good inventions start with a problem, and San Francisco entrepreneur Scott Summit saw a problem with prosthetics.

SCOTT SUMMIT: One of the things I feel is a real shortcoming of traditional prosthetics is that anybody who comes in gets a choice between knees and feet and what-not fitted for mechanical reasons, but the aesthetics are neglected.

Summit is the co-founder of Bespoke Innovations in the city’s South Park area. The National Limb Loss Information Center says every year, U.S. hospitals perform more than 130,000 amputation procedures. In fact, nearly 2 million Americans are learning to live with an amputation of some sort. Summit’s clients may need prosthetic legs, but all of them are active. Some ride motorcycles, while others do yoga and play soccer. Many of them are interested in fashion and have a keen eye for design. Summit’s goal is to channel the personalities of his clients and give them a prosthetic that feels more like a real part of them.

SUMMIT: I tried this out on the guy who volunteered to be a subject, and his girlfriend came in, and she looked at it, and her reaction was, “Wow, that looks better than your other leg.” And he thought about for a second, and he smiles and said, “Yeah, nobody’s ever said that.”

The prosthetic is sleek, like a chrome motorcycle fender in the shape of a leg. You can see your reflection in the metal, which is engraved with an exact copy of the client’s arm tattoo.

Bespoke’s designs are lightweight and durable, and each creation is unique to the recipient, which is interesting enough. But Summit says what’s more remarkable is how they’re made: through advances in 3D printing technology.

SUMMIT: The 3D printer is a departure from traditional fabrication in every way. Instead of subtracting material from a big block of plastic or metal like traditional machining does, this builds it up essentially molecule by molecule. A laser melts all these molecules together, and they assemble them sequentially in layers, and when you get it done, in the end it’s a final product.

Building materials at an atomic level? Melting molecules with lasers? It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually become fairly commonplace. Let me tell you exactly how it works:

The printer is loaded with materials like a normal printer is loaded with an ink cartridge. But while a desk jet printer lays down layers of ink to form letters, words and sentences, a 3D printer laser stacks materials to create a product assembling layers of metal, plastic and leather.

For Summit’s purposes, he scans an amputee’s remaining leg using a camera and computer, then uses the mirror image to create a part in the exact shape of the one that was lost.

SUMMIT: You have complete flexibility of geometry. So you can come up with any shape you can imagine for the most part and just simply send it off to the printer like you send your print job to Kinkos. It comes back in the mail three days later, and it’s ready and that’s as easy as the process is.

3D printers come in an array of sizes from tiny ones that create fine jewelry to ones that could house jewelry stores. In fact, researchers at USC are developing a more efficient, less labor-intensive way to build entire homes just by pressing the print button. Summit says even NASA is looking into 3D printing as a space age alternative to traditional construction.

SUMMIT: If you’re gonna create a lunar station, you’re not going to do it by hauling your cranes and your gantries and cement bags and everything else up onto the moon. You are really going to want to do it by three-dimensionally printing a structure right on the moon.

3D printing is becoming less cost prohibitive for NASA – and for you and me. Industrial style 3D printers, like the ones used to create Bespoke’s designs cost tens of thousands of dollars. But the most basic home kit, one that can produce small-scale prototype designs, costs about a thousand dollars. Which means it’s possible that relatively soon, with the right computer programming skills, you’ll be able to rub this little genie and make whatever you wish for appear. It’s not quite magic. It’s three-dimensional science.

In San Francisco, I’m Brian Pelletier for Crosscurrents.