Luna Park opened in Brooklyn in 1903, during the heyday of Coney Island attractions. This weekend, artist Fred Kahl pays tribute to the park’s history with a 3D-printed model depicting it as it appeared 100 years ago. It’s being billed as the largest art installation ever created on a desktop 3D printer, and building it involved some fascinating, custom-made technology.
If you’ve ever used a microscope, you’ll recognize the C.E.M. Crown Extruder. The brainchild of German engineer Cem Schnitzler, this specially designed head can twist to bring hot filament in contact with multiple styles of printing head, allowing you to lay down different diameters of 3D-printed plastic. A system of motors and pulleys controls the head position and can turn to… Read More
Kids these days! If they’re not wilding and smoking doobies, they’re using CAD/CAM software and a lot of engineering insight to build a ketchup bottle cap that ensures that you will never have to deal with the messy separated liquid that squirts out before the actual ketchup does. Read More
Despite the on-going hype attached to 3D printing, and the advent of more consumer-friendly, affordable machines designed with a mainstream user in mind, consumer adoption of 3D printers is set for relatively slow growth in the near term, according to analyst Juniper Research. Read More
Everybody’s excited about the possibilities of 3D printing, but, for some people, the technology stands to improve their lives on a daily if not hourly basis. Jose Delgado, Jr., a 53-year-old man born without most of his left hand, is one of them. Thanks to 3D-printing, Jose got a new hand.
So we have been hearing a fair amount about 3D printers recently and how they might be used in the medical industry. Now as far as prosthetic limbs are concerned, they do get pretty expensive especially when it involves movable parts, like in the case of Jose Delgado Jr. Jose was born without a left hand and in the past year, he had been using a prosthetic hand that costs $42,000.
The device receives signals from the muscles in Jose’s forearm and will allow the mechanical fingers of the device to move like a real hand would. Perhaps interested in seeing how a 3D printed limb might hold out against a more expensive and hi-tech one, Jeremy Simon from 3DUniverse decided to pay Jose a visit and offered to print him the Cyborg Beast prosthetic hand made from ABS plastic which only costs about $50 to print.
So how does the device fare against the $42,000 prosthetic limb? Well it turns out that Jose is actually liking the Cyborg Beast a lot more than his $42,000 limb. Jose claims that the Cyborg Beast is more comfortable and performed better. However he did note that some pieces do break off due to its material, but printing it is easy and not to mention very affordable.
At the moment Simon is working with Jose on printing a new hand, this time from a material called Bridge nylon which is supposed to be even stronger than the previous one. If anything this just serves to show that prosthetic limbs can be 3D printed at a very low cost, which means that people living in war torn countries or army veterans will be able to get access to replacement limbs much easily. In the meantime you can check out the video above to see Jose comparing his $50 hand to his $42,000 hand.
Man Compares $50 3D Printed Hand To $42,000 Prosthetic Limb , original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Medical, 3d printing,
So we’ve seen how 3D printers can be used to print medical-related gadgets, such as a portion of a skull, and while those are great and serve as viable alternatives compared to current implants and whatnot, wouldn’t it be better if those 3D printed medical gadgets/accessories could actively help your healing process as well?
Well perhaps now it can, thanks to a prototype cast which not only acts as a regular cast, but at the same time uses ultrasonic vibrations that will help speed up the bone healing time. This design was put together by Turkish student, Denis Karasahin, who managed to win the 2014 Golden A’Design Award for his idea.
Now the concept of 3D printed casts and ultrasonic vibrations to help heal bones have been around for a while. One of the difficulties of ultrasonic vibrations is that it requires the leads to be placed directly on the skin above the part of the bone that needs healing. As you can imagine, plaster casts make this impossible, if not extremely difficult, but as you can see in the image above, a 3D printed cast can allow for openings where the leads can be placed onto the skin.
Unfortunately this seems to be in its prototype stages right now, but given that 3D printing is catching on, especially in the medical industry who has seen a lot of use for such devices and the objects it can print, we wouldn’t be surprised if this idea catches on a lot faster than we’d expect. Soon we might be able to say goodbye to smelly and dirty casts, and hello to quicker recovery time!
3D Printed Cast With Ultrasonic Vibrations Helps Speed Up Recovery , original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Medical, 3d printing,
There are lots of reasons to love 3D printing. It democratizes manufacturing, putting consumers in granular control of the things they own — rather than requiring them to choose from a finite pre-made selection. However there’s a flip-side to this freedom. The detritus that will inevitably be created simply because it’s possible to print a physical object at the click of a button. Read More
We’ve seen 3D-printed cells, organs, and even body parts
As a genre, "desk toys" are usually pretty corny, from Newton’s Cradle sculptures to creepy meditation balls. But these tiny creatures—which are miniatures of the giant self-propelled sculptures designed by Dutch artist Theo Jansen—are anything but.
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