TechStuff Prints In 3D (Again)

no where he's there. Joe and I have worked extensively together on Forward Thinking, which is the show all about future technology, feature science, what the world is just gonna be like in twenty to fifty years or beyond in some cases. And so one of the things we've talked about at length on that show is three D printing. So I thought we would have a little full discussion

called three D Printers. I'm excited to talk about this because the only other time I've been a guest host on tech Stuff, we talked about the anti Kither mechanism, one of the oldest machines on Earth yea, or what some would call probably the oldest computer. And so that was the ancient past of technology. Now I want to talk about what's big in the future, and I think

what's big is three D printing. Yeah, it's it's undoubtedly going to be huge and in fact, Joe has some interesting firsthand experience he can relate because, as it turns out, we here at the office have a new three D printer, and Joe has sort of become the the overseer of it. By default, he was the one who sees the opportunity. Yeah,

nobody told me to. We we came in one day for a Monday morning meeting and they just wheeled this three D printer in and I was very excited, and they said, well, start playing with it, and nobody else started playing with it. So I seized the day. Yep, sees the moment he sees the opportunism, sees the three D printer, Yeah, and grabbed hold of it, got the instructions, installed all the software, and I started printing plastic death,

just monstrosities and Asian failures, rolling up big balls. That turns out there's a curve to using this this device, and Joe has done a lot of trial and even more error to figure out exactly how to use it. And I wish you could see the just the beautiful plastic graveyard. There's some things that like some sort of plastic spaghetti that has I call them plastic hairballs. Yeah, that's probably a better better description. Anyway, this thing looks

like it's about the size of a large microwave. Yeah, yeah, maybe a little bit taller. Yeah, and it uh, it actually can print in two different colors of plastic at the same time, which is pretty awesome. But anyway, we should probably talk about what a three D printer actually is. Kind of give a quick rundown for any of you who have not listened to the previous Tech Stuff episodes where we talked about three D printing and you maybe have heard the term, but you don't really know what

it is. It's a type of additive manufacturing. Additive as in the opposite of subtraction, and the same thing as addition, you're putting on layers. Yes, you are building an object layer by layer in some way. Uh, you're topical consumer model.

Will be using a type of plastic with a binder material so that it binds to itself, and the layers can be very thin, maybe just a couple of microns thick or even less, depending upon Like if you're using a state of the art nano three D printer, you're talking about layers so thin that they are like it might as well be one dimensional ours is not our consumer, right, the kind of thing that you could, like an actual person could buy, yes, yes, as opposed to those those

non real people who are able to get those nano printers. Um, yeah, it's exactly. It's the kind of a consumer could purchase straight online. In fact, that is the model that we have, is one that you can buy right now, right. The idea of additive manufacturing is a cool paradigm. It's different than what we're usually used to. When you want to create a very specifically tailored three D object, usually you're gonna carve, right, You're gonna take some the external material

until you've got what you need exactly. Um. We talked, uh, we were talking about this in terms of like Michelangelo's The David. Yes, you would have a giant slab of marble, and then you carve away all the stuff that doesn't look like David until you're left with David. Right. It's so it's kind of a cool metaphor there, because there's this idea in the history of art about the sculpture emerging from the stone and it exists within the stone

and you've just unleashed it. I guess this would be more like if you were to create the David by dripping and creating a David stalagmite in a cave right until it was fully formed as David. Now that hopefully faster than that the right. The additive approach does mean that you are not wasting as much material, right because you're not taking a large block of something and then carving it down until you have the object you want.

You are instead using pretty much the stuff you need to build the thing you want, and and very little goes to waste, with the exception of the whatever you use making all these dead prototypes that get to work. Right, But assuming you get your printer working in chip shape, then basically no ways. And uh, typically the consumer models are printing in plastic, right, So uh, what is ours

printing right now? Well, ours can do a B S or p l A right now, We've got it loaded up with p l A. That's sort of a nice friendly bioplastic polylactic acid. Jonathan A B S. What does that stand for? All right, Let's let's see rillo nitrial beauta dein styrene. I say that without looking it up, so I could be wrong, but I think it's a krylo nitrial beautadeene Styrene. I did a video where I was talking about this stuff for something else, and um, yeah, I think I finally got it. I'll forget it by

next week for sure. But the thing about these plastics is when they are heated to a certain temperature, they become pliable. And that's when you put them through what's called extruder. It's what ends up printing these in these tiny layers, these thin streams of plastic that can be layered on top of one another, and then when it cools down, it will set into whatever shape it's been put into. So you heat it up, you shape it, you let it cool, and then it's set that way.

This is the stuff a b s, by the way, is the stuff that lego bricks are made up of. Oh yeah, so um yeah, if you are able to heat it up properly, you put it through this extruder. The extruder lays down the layers, the binding agent helps it bind to itself, preferably only to itself and not to anything else, and then once it cools down, you're good to go. You've got your object. Yeah, so that's the basic idea, and uh, we already talked about how

it's less wasteful than other approaches. But one of the other big advantages is that you can make prototypes really really fast. Right, So this would be, for example, if you are some kind of inventor engineer maker. You're the person who's trying to put something together in your garage and in a lot of cases you're going to need a custom made part. Yeah, but how do you get

that part? How do you get a custom made part? Well, I mean you could come up with the design specs and you could mail those off to you maybe email these days, and send them off to a company that does their own fabrication and they'll make it and then they'll send it back to you. Man, that is a long time to wait, especially if you messed up and you need to redesign. There could be there could be so many points of failure along that pathway. Right. First

of all, your design might turn out not to work. Secondly, the manufacturing company might end up making it but not quite make it to your specifications, which means it still doesn't work. Even if you send in the correct stuff, you might get something back that's wrong. And either way, once you figure out it doesn't work, you have to go through that whole process again, and this takes a

lot of time. With a three D printer, you could print up your design idea, you know, design it in a computer assisted design program a CAD program, print it out, and then test it to see if it actually works. Assuming that everything printed properly, then you're you can test it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, you can go tweak the design and print a new one, which means you go from design to prototype much more quickly.

Of course, i'd imagine in a lot of cases that you're not going to be necessarily printing your final version. It might be more useful for producing just the prototype than for the actual final product, because maybe you're you're printing in p L A or A B S or some kind of plastic that's not really ideal for what it is, but you can you can see if it

fits right. You can have this part well, especially if you're doing something like imagine that you're you're designing a new type of car and you want to test it to find out what kind of drag it's going to have when it's at speed, So you're going to put it through the model. You're gonna put through a wind tunnel. Well, it doesn't really matter what it's made out of, assuming that the material itself is is nice and smooth. You want a high resolution three D printer, that means those

layers have to be really, really thin. But you can put that through a wind tunnel and see if it's behaving the way you anticipated, and if it's not, then you can go back to the design process, change some things, and test it out again without going through this whole process of sending it out to a fabricator to build

the whole thing. Of course, then there's another thing, which is customization, customization of designs that already exists, and this comes in when you couple the power of a three D printer with the power of a three D scanner, a three D scanner, or or even just a three D design program, right, because you can customize whatever you like, however you like it. But yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, what I had in mind is so you've got a part, but you want to change it a little bit so

you can scan it with the three D scanner. Things like this exist where you can use like lasers or even just camera based technology. I've read about ideas on how to create three D scanners with a Microsoft connect. Yeah, the three six D connect, we should say, just because the Xbox one is much more locked down. Yeah, But so you can scan a physical object, turn that into a virtual object, make changes to the virtual object, send it to the three D printer, and then you've got

an new real object, new physical object, right right. So, if you end up seeing an idea that you think is good but you want to improve upon it, which is something that is common in say the open source community, you know, this idea of people who have ways of improving something should be allowed the chance to do so, that kind of appeals to that type of person. Of course, there's a whole range of intellectual property issues when it comes down to three D printing. We're not really going

to touch on that. We talked about that in previous episodes of tech Stuff, but it is one of those things where suddenly we have to worry about how do we protect the design of a physical object. Now that it's possible, at least depending upon the object, to make a duplicate of that, you know, without going to the original source, which is that's kind of interesting that we live in that world now. But Anyway, the three D printing as a whole got started in industries like automotive

and aerospace, where it was used in prototyping. It wasn't even called three D printing originally and had lots of different names depending upon the specif offic approach, But now we kind of use three D printing as an overall term for anything that's using this kind of additive manufacturing approach where you're laying down layer by layer. They have different implementations, but they're all based on a similar process. Of course, i'd imagine once we're talking about industrial uses,

we're not just talking about plastic. I mean, the consumer models are probably going to be printing in plastic, but really you can print in pretty much anything that can be melted and then resolidify in a way that is useful. Yeah, you can even do things like, uh, you're not really printing in wood, but you can print a material that simulates would. So there's all sorts of things that you can find in the industrial world. Now, granted, those printers

are a little pricing. We're talking like thousands of dollars. That's why it's out of the consumer range. Yeah, the consumer models tend to be between about a thousand and five thousand dollars these days. Well, there there are actually some really cheap ones. Don't know how much you can do with them, but you can get a three D printer for a few hundred bucks. Yes, I don't know

how capable it is. But the one we have in the office, the dual extruder that can print in two different it was which you know, it's not like that's an insignificant amount of money, but it does put it within the realm of the consumer market, which is interesting, and I think that's pretty cheap for its size. Yes, yeah, no, it really is. Because I've seen maker bots, which maker Bot three D printers are great to the one we

have is as a mono price three D printer. Uh. The maker bot ones are really good too, but they are um they also tend to be a little more expensive. So it's interesting that we're now getting to this point where consumers can have this uh this access themselves. And we'll talk more about the experience of using those in a minute, but first I want to kind of look ahead and say, what are some of the crazy ways that three D printers are being used right now? Like,

what are or being proposed for the future. Um and actually the ones we're talking about now, they've all been used in some form or another. Uh, maybe not to a point where we can all get our hands on the stuff, but it's it's these are actual projects that are happening now. Yeah. How about three D printing of buildings? Yeah, this actually is not that new of an idea, the one that the contour crafting one, which I have actually

listed second in my notes. Contour Crafting started back in the mid two thousand's, but the idea has really taken off since there's been a you know, this whole slew of information about three D printing in general. Well, I mean, depending on how weird you want to get. Didn't like Thomas Edison have this idea about pouring concrete into these molds to create houses. He may have that rings about

Maybe I'm just maybe that's not true. Well, this kind of gun in the news again not too long ago when a company called win Soon, a Chinese company, began to demonstrate three D printers printing houses. They said they could print ten houses in a day using four massive three D printers. When I say massive, I'm talking about ten ms wide. That's about thirty three ft by six point six meters tall, that's twenty two ft. These are

big printers, and they were using four of them. Now they printed the houses and pieces and then they had to be put together. Now, these aren't These aren't design necessarily like the three D printers you'll see sitting on a table somewhere, usually where there's an external rigid structure and then you print within it. Right, that doesn't work

so well with houses. Now these look like giant arms. Now, grant again, since these were printing in in pieces, they were just sort of printing walls or roofs, that kind of thing um, and they would lay down the the geometric pattern to kind of give stability for things like corners stuff like that. And they're using concrete and other recycled construction waste material to try and cut down on on on materials that need to be used in the

actual three D process. And if you look at it, if you watch the videos, it certainly doesn't look like a three D printer of the way I had described earlier, where you're adding thin layer to thin layer. It looks kind of like a frosting pipe. It like if you're piping frosting onto a cake at the big blobs of concrete being laid down one after the other, which makes sense because if you're building something as large as that as a house, you can't be laying down micron thick layers.

You would take forever to finish a project, um, and you certainly wouldn't be able to build ten in a day even using four of these things. So it's the layers are much thicker. But it was really interesting to see this approach. The houses are pretty modest. They could do two stories, but again it was all printed in separate pieces that would have to be as symboled later by by a crew, so it's not like it was printing it from the floor to the ceiling and one piece.

But it was still pretty interesting, very very simple, like you know, front door, back door, no rooms type of thing. It was more of a kind of proof of concept, the idea that this could be a way to to provide housing, either in emergency situations or even as a way of you know, if if we're given more funding than we can build actual you know, nice houses and

not just a glorified room with a couple of doors. Um. But it's not the only one the Contour Crafting company I mentioned before that came out of a project from the University of Southern California, and it's an even larger UH proposed three D printer. There, they've built some that were able to build walls very similar to the one from wind Soon, but the big Daddy would be mounted on a rail system, so it could actually roll up

and down this rail system. You have rails that would be on either side of the print site, right, and you would be printing in between the rails. The printer itself would be kind of like a U shaped and upside down you shape on top of this rail system, and the print head would be able to move all uh left and right and and up and down the whole build site. You can build an entire house in one piece, so with multiple rooms and multiple floors. So

it was really an interesting approach. And Hi, Yeah, we'll talk about adhesion failures at length later, but the it was really cool seeing how this this would work. And again it was one of those things proposed for things like a people are displaced after a disaster, like imagine something like this after the Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, being able to print housing for people so that they're not all having to stay in a giant stadium in

decreasing conditions, rapidly decreasing conditions. Um, you know, it could definitely be really useful, and it really brings down the cost of fabricating something like that, and also the time, Like if you can print a house in twenty four hours, I mean, I don't know if you've noticed any housing projects going up anywhere, but they tend to take some time start to finish. If you're able to do that

in a span of twenty four hours, that's incredible. So certainly has its place, So that that was one of the the uses we wanted to talk about. So I got one that we came across actually when Lauren and I were doing Forward Thinking episode without you about food replicators. You know this, this is interesting to me. So food replicators of course, the dream technology from Star Trek where it's just pulling atoms from anywhere and then building dream

food on it. Essentially that's sort of the same thing as the molecular assembler you've heard about from the Gray Goose scenario. And we concluded that we don't think that this is very likely anytime soon. Um, if it's ever going to happen at all. But we also talked about, well, what are the things that that are sort of in that realm, and a lot of people when they saw that people were using three D printers to create food, they said, Okay, it's the Star Trek replicator. It's not,

but it is very interesting. I don't know if I'd want to eat any of this food. But who's looking into it? Well, actually a NASA was looking into it, and there's so there's more than one group. There are some private companies that are making just consumer food three D printers for your home to make the you know, little desserts and tortellinis and strange things like that in UM. But the big one was NASA. So NASA was working with this company to create three D printing technologies for space.

And I guess the idea is that it can sort of help give astronauts some of the comforts of home. So instead of having all of your food decided upon in advance, and you may or may not have much of us say in it, so you know, in space you typically are eating from these prepackaged food things little

bags since be kind of pasteish. Yeah, that they want to minimize crumbs and things like that that could float away and get clogged in instruments, she needs to be things that are very easy to glob together and eat quickly out of the package. I've read reports that the astronauts really like the shrimp cocktail, which sounds do I'm suspicious, but I'd be willing to try it after after my MRI experience, I'm I'm pretty much ready for any of those,

so I'd give it a go. Well, anyway, so you can actually go online and watch videos of this prototype right now. They they've filmed early versions of the three D printed pizza. And the way this sort of works is that it works because you're using foods that can be easily sort of put into a homogeneous container and then extruded in different layers. So if your ingredients are some kind of starchy dope paste, some kind of tomato based paste, and some kind of cheese paste, right, you

can make you can print a pizza, you know. So the idea being that if you could get enough basic ingredients and then combine them in different ways, you could theoretically make a lot of different types of food, or at least food that tastes and has different textures from each other, which would be important for deep space missions. Right. The whole idea here is that the astronauts would have more choices so they wouldn't end up eating the same

thing day after day after day and then risk space madness. Um, that's certainly what would happen to me. I'm like, I am not having this terrible reconstituted imitation crab paste again. I gotta have something else. Um. And also still be able to provide the nutritional value necessary to maintain your health in space, which we've talked about and forward thinking. It's not easy to do that. Keeping keeping healthy in space really hard because space is trying to kill you

in multiple ways. So um, it's you know, it needs to be nutritious. It needs to be tasty, because you don't want it to be unpleasant, especially for a deep space kind of thing, where again space madness. And and

have that variety, at least the illusion of variety. Even if the basic ingredients are all like maybe it's limited to something like twenty different basic ingredients, you could put up a great variety of things just by playing with how much of each ingredient goes into a particular dish, and the description I read even had it where they were printing essentially the taste and smell and the nutrients

on top of the finished product. Anyway, so you could play with all the sort of stuff and create all these different textures and tastes and uh and again you're just using that basic stuff, which it's it's an interesting idea. I'd I'd be willing to try it just to see how uh how different to quote unquote different dishes would

actually taste and feel. I'd want to I'd want to see imagining the glitch where it prints you a pizza, but it makes it smell like cherry pie, right and it ends up tasting like tasting like duck lange, and what is going on? My brain is broken? Uh yeah. So anyway, that's not so great at averting space madness then, But let's let's stay on the topic of space. Okay, okay,

but not in space madness kind of way. Uh So, three D printers are starting to take a larger role in space industry in general, not just in the food but in building stuff that allows us to get into space. Sure. Yeah, well, I mean we're back to the old thing we were talking about the prototyping, right, except making actual parts we're going to use. To the point, right, we're no longer just talking about printing a prototype that we test and then we end up making the final product based upon

that prototype. We're actually talking about using three D printers to build the parts themselves. So space X is Dragon V two space capsule is amazing, it's super cool. There was a big veiling event where Elon Musk came out and said, take a look at this beauty here, and it it's probably the first, uh space capsule I've seen where it's supposed to be an actual working space capsule

and it looks like something from science fiction. So instead of having that those massive control panels that have just tons of switches and buttons and things that are completely unidentifiable to me, as like like trying to fly the Millennium Falcon where you just have all these switches and you're like, how does this actually an iPad? Yeah, that's what the new one looks like. It's got these giant screens and a lot of it looks more intuitive and sleek,

which is pretty interesting. But beyond that, it's also got these super Draco sixteen thousand pound thrust engines four of them, and those have engine chambers that were made by three D printers. It did not use plastic, which you would I hope not because you imagine that the temperatures would

probably be a of that melting point. Instead, it used direct metal laser centering UH centering s I n T E R I n G. So this is where you take a powder in this case of metal powder, and you center you turn it into solid material through heat or pressure. In this case, we're talking about heat which

is provided by a laser. So you shoot this laser at the metal powder and you lay the metal powder down layer by layer, and through this process, which is very similar to the three D partwers we see in the consumer market, is just using a different implementation, you build the object you need, in this case, the engine chambers.

So it's really cool to me that three D printerers could help us actually get into space, and beyond that, we're talking about eventually having three D printers in space where you can print things like tools that you might need or even replacement parts for the spacecraft you're in. I mean, they're your order back to the replicator, except obviously it can't make it from atoms and you probably can't make anything, no, you would, You would be limited

by both materials, materials and whatever your printers dimensions are. Nevertheless, this could be really, really useful in space. I mean, just one example I thought of is obviously they didn't have kind of sophisticated three D printers back then. To think about Apollo thirteen when they had to on the fly build a I believe it was a CEO to scrubber.

It was some kind of it was a ventilation tool that they needed, but they didn't have an extra one aboard, and so they were having a deadly build up of CEO two in the capsule and they had to improvise one. Basically, they had some guys trying to figure out how to put one together based on the stuff they had lying around, and they sort of did get it working. But I mean, imagine if they could have just loaded up the virtual CEO too scrubber on the computer and pressed print to

get a new one. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great ex ample. That could very well be the sort of thing we see in the future. Um. It also helps because it's expensive to launch stuff into space. I mean, it's incredibly expensive because of the fuel and and you know, SpaceX it's looking to try and bring those costs down by using as many reusable features as possible, so that way you don't have to build a brand new vehicle every single time you want to launch something up into space.

But even so, you still have a lot of expenses, and it's it costs a huge amount of money just just send a couple of pounds of stuff up into space. Uh. Now, add on to that that, if you're having actual parts that you need to send up that takes up physical space, it's not just the weight that actually takes up room. If you were able to send just the raw material up the toner in this case to a three D printer,

you could conserve at least the space part. The weight would still be ultimately the same, but one way it might affect the way. I don't know how often astronauts use all the tools they take. I mean, what if it is the case that you you take up more than you need just in case, um, maybe all you need to take in this case would be again the raw materials and the virtual objects, and then so you don't have to take all these tools that you never

end up using. I need to use this one. In a few minutes, I'm going to print one, Like, seriously, I can't find the nail clippers again, where do these things go off? To just print me a new one. I'm just thinking of my own self here, all right, And then moving on from space, there's also the use of three D printers in medicine. One of the stories that I looked at was a student by the name of Deniz Karashian who built a new kind of cast

for broken bones using a three D printer. And it looks kind of like you're wearing super heavy fish nets on whatever limb you have to have. It's got this kind of web pattern, so there's parts of your skin are left open to the air, but it is there to stabilize the limb. So it's doing the same thing as a plaster cast. But because you're skin is still left open to the air, you don't have to worry about one. You don't have to worry about it getting

wet and then suddenly getting all stinky and nasty and stuff. Oh, you could probably scratch and yeah. And also on a slightly more therapeutic note, besides just you know, relieving an itch, you could use a technique called low intensity pulsed ultrasound or lipus, which can possibly help broken bones heal by stimulating UH the healing by you actually beam ultrasonic frequencies

through the skin into the bone. But the problem with that is that you usually have to have contact with the skin in order to get an effective UM beam to the bone itself, and if you're wearing a plaster cast, then that will block the ultrasonic frequencies. UM. There's still some controversy or at least some debate about how effective lipus is in this particular approach. I've never even heard

of that was. So does it stimulate the osteoblasts to make new It's it's actually pretty complex, and the hypotheses about what the mechanism is that there's some disagreement with that as well. So it's one of those things that still depending upon the study you read, is really promising or it's negligible. So it depends upon what you're looking at.

I think that's one going to be one of those things where we still need to see a lot more work done in that field and research to make sure that it's UH, that it's actually efficacious, But UH it's promising. So and at any rate, even if even if that turns out to not work, the ultrasonic approach and still scratch, yeah,

you can still scratch. Yeah. So if you've ever had a broken bone, like a broken leg or a broken arm where you had to wear that plaster cast and you know how irritating that could be, just imagine if that was just a plastic webli case and they could print these into two pieces and it just snaps onto your limb. So also means that it's pretty easy to take it off too, so it's not like, you know, uh, as as big a deal as it would be with plaster. But you can also print body parts like a prosthesis.

We've seen that in the past as well, people getting prosthetic hands or prosthetic arms or prosthetic legs and printing them. Uh. There, I guess here's where the sort of endless customization sort of helps certain exactly to what your need is. Yeah, And there are open source projects where it's the attempt is to bring down the cost of developing a prosthetic because they are very expensive and so it puts it out of out of the range of a lot of people.

Who need it, And there's the hope that through three D printers and by creating models that are very effective, even if they are rudimentary compared to state of the art robotic prostheses, they can help people who otherwise would go without. So that's really cool. And then there's also

just printing things like a replacement joint. Um. That's something that I'm seeing three D printers used for to print something like a hip replacement, so that you get something specifically tailored to the person the patient, so you don't have to worry about, you know, being approximately what the patient needs. You could you can make it precisely to

what the patient needs, So that's definitely useful. And then if that's not cool enough, how about printing a new organ like yeah, like a liver, not not like the musical instrument, I mean like a human organ like box. No, no, no, I'm talking about printing something like box liver, box liver, box lungs or box heart. Um. So yeah, there's been some early work with this and it's very promising. The basic idea would be to take stem cells from the

transplant patient. This is under an ideal implementation, you take stem cells from the transplant patient use those stem cells to develop into whatever tissue is needed. So let's say a patient who wants to have a who needs to have a heart transplant. So you do it to print a new heart, and you use essentially biological scaffold to build to print the tissue on top of until you have a working heart that you then can uh give to the patient. You can you can surgically remove their

heart and replace it with the printed heart. And because it comes from the patient's own stem cells, one, the patient doesn't have to work wait for a suitable donor because they are effectively their own donor. And two they are less likely to have their body reject that organ because it's based off their own biology. Now, there are some big, big challenges with this because it's not just printing the tissue that you need to do. You have to print the tissue exactly correctly. You have to have

the the vasculization is what they call it. That's the printing out the blood vessels so that the organs will get the nutrients they need so they don't die, and also have the pathway for uh anything that the organ's excrete, so that they don't build up to Xin's that's really complicated stuff. But I just read a report that said scientists at the universities of Harvard, Stanford, m I T, and Sydney have kind of reached a breakthrough with this, and so it looks like the vascualization problem is a

little closer to being solved. It's not that we're going to be seeing this technique used in the next year or two years. This might be ten or fifteen years down the line. But it's incredibly promising, which is really cool. This idea of being able to take away one of the big problems when it comes to transplant patients, which is finding a suitable donor. I mean that's that there are there are people who are having to wait for years for that kind of thing, and and uh, this

has the potential to completely eliminate that. So anyway, it's yeah, phenomenal stuff. And there are other really cool uses of three D printers out there. But now that we talked about the bleeding edge best of the best, that the stuff we're gonna see in the future, let's talk about a comedy of errors your experience using our three D printer. And keep in mind this is not to say that the three D printer we have is a bad one. Oh no, it's just very particular. Well, there's sort of

this is sort of a comment. I've learned a lot about the state of consumer three D printers lately. So what have we made here in the office. Well, I printed a little castle that's successfully printed all the way up until um the little flagpole at the top of the castle was supposed to come to a point, but instead it comes to a globuler blah blah kind of jab of the hut thing at the top of the flagpole.

I haven't quite figured out how to do points yet. Okay, I've printed some Illuminati pyramids for the guys that stuff they don't want you to know. So I just did that by combining a pyramid with an eye and and they have them yeah, and also with the initials I think, didn't you Yeah, yeah, So along the bottom of the pyramid is uh S T d W. However you pronum eze stuff they don't want you to know. Um. I designed a how stuff works logo Yeah that has a

big has a little question mark. Made a bunch of those, and I put that together in an online cat I can talk about in a minute, A couple of actually functional whistles that at least fourteen people put their mouths on. Now, yeah, I'm one of those people. I expect to have some sort of crazy you'll contract mono anytime, you know. Yeah, I certainly have started to lose interest in and uh things like, um, you know work. I don't know if that's mono or just that we have a holiday weekend

coming up after we finished this a podcast. Yeah, so I've got a lot of malformed half whistles that are or maybe more like one eighth of a whistle. Yeah, it's kind of like what what whistles would look like if they came from HP Lovecraft's mythology. Yeah, and then I just massive, massive l graveyard of plastic hairballs and plastic tumbleweeds. So for one thing we are, we are printing with p l A. That's right, not not a BS.

So the different plastics have different strengths and weaknesses. I learned p l A is I think a good thing if you're just doing what we're doing, which is experimenting. Yeah, it doesn't give off fumes like a BS does. In fact, I was just reading because someone in our office was I'd say, with perfectly good reason concerned, Um, should we have that thing out printing while we're all sing around and creating toxic fumes? That's going to make us all sick.

I read about it there. So apparently three D printing has been measured to produce these tiny particles, you know, these these little, very very small particles that when you breathe in a whole lot of these particles, it may be dangerous. Um, it doesn't seem to me. Now, this doesn't mean please go huff your three D printers. From what I can just tell on the reading I've done, it doesn't seem to me like p L A has

got a lot to worry about. A B. S might be a different question, and that that might be a case where you really need some good ventilation. Um. And and p l A, it said, had a lot fewer of these particle emissions than maybe S did. So we've been using p L A on a fast action dual extruder three D printers. So dual extruder means you can load two filaments up, you put two rollers of plastic wire on the back of it, and this is what Yeah, and it pulls these filaments up through the top and

these little tubes down to the extruders. The extruders heat up the filament so that it becomes malten and it drips out the end as the extruder moves along in a preset pattern until the whole thing is laid down and it's created. Um So, from what I've heard, this printer is much faster than the one we used to have in the AFIS. I never got to use that printer.

I have heard Annie and Video used it a lot, but they said that it took that printer like all day to print a little chess piece that we still have, and this one can print pretty quickly. I think the whistles we made took like thirty or forty minutes, so that's fast. There's a lot I really like about three D printing. Yeah, I really like how it gets you

from idea to object. It's um it's very cool to design something in a virtual environment and then see it become a real object that you hold in your hand, to go from conceptual to physical. Right. Obviously, we've been doing stuff like this with two D documents for years and that's just not very impressive to us anymore. For some reason, it seems like it should be. I means, the same thing, you're taking a virtual document and suddenly it becomes physical. But I don't know, that just doesn't

seem to be a big deal. But it is pleasing to me to print a three D object in the same way that it's pleasing to me to like find a place based on a map. There's some kind of deep comfort caused by the connect shin between your imagination and material reality. I don't know is the thing that's

always been true for me. Um. Another thing about it that's cool is also the reason it's kind of frustrating, which is that three D printing is much more widespread than it used to be on one hand, but on the other hand, it's still sort of in the geek space. We're still working it out. Uh. And I think that most three D printers, certainly the one I've been working with and all the different ones I've been reading about online and these forums have been consulting for pointers on

how to fix the problems I've been having. It's not three D printers these days aren't like buying a new iPad. You know what, what is it? Apple hardware? They've always said about it it just works, right, that's sort of the slogan. Yeah, it's not even like printing, like getting a regular printer, that's just plug and play, right, Because a regular printer these days, you can get a printer that hooks up via USB to your computer. You don't

even have to install any drivers or anything. It all looks for everything for you, automatically installs the next thing you know, you can print. Uh that's you know, we've that that technology has reached maturity, right, but we're so we're living in this world now that is dominated by the philosophy of it just works. That's what technology should be. So when you get a new iPad, you pull it out of the box and it's ready to go. It's got built in interfaces for pretty much everything you might

want to do. It's all there, and it's very obvious and it's very easy. Uh, you don't have to open up the hood customized and configure the settings. But from my experience and from what I've read online, most or all of the consumer three D printers these days, it does not just work. You have to do a lot of reconfiguration and fiddling with the machine and and messing with the code to try to get things to come out right. You've got to change the platform temperature, change

the extruder temperature. Maybe that's not right, Maybe change a few more degrees level to build plate covering the platform with, you know, just whatever you think can make it stick. It's very interesting. So I had a lot of fun doing this kind of trouble shooting, and I think a lot of the people who have three D printers these days are the kind of people who have fun trouble shooting machines like that. It kind of reminds me of the difference between Android and iOS. Android users tend or

at least they used to. It's got a lot closer. The field is really narrowed quite a bit. But when Android first came out, it was an operating system that appealed to people who were willing to put in some work to get the most out of their operating system. Now iOS is a fantastic operating system and it does really just work. Yeah. It's one of those you hear stories all the time about how kids pick up an iPhone and within seconds have figured out how to how

to navigate through it. They figured out how to zoom and get out of that and and no one's told them how it works. It just works because that's the way it was designed from the ground up. It does mean that you're limited in what you can do, but what you can do is so there's so many, so much varie and what you can do that it doesn't feel like you're limited. Android os, you were less limited in what you could do. But it also wasn't as intuitive, and that seems to be where the three D printing

world is right now. It's not necessarily intuitive to work with these things. You have to put in some work to get the best results out of it. But if you're willing to do that, you can get some pretty incredible results. Right. And I also like how that has created this cool community people online who use three D printers. Like I said, I've been looking at a lot of forums and stuff to try to figure out how to fix the problems I've had. There there are online communities.

It is a tech community that people figuring out. Okay, a lot of people have had this problem. Here's one way that they often solved it. It doesn't make you wonder who was the first person to attempt some of

the solutions, right right? Oh yeah, I mean people like risk damaging their machines because yeah, because some of these cases, like when you talking about the platform, that's the surface upon which the three D printer lays down the plastic, right, So and so some people have these crazy solutions like, Oh, you can't get your p l A to stick to the platform, try spraying it with hair spray. Yeah. I

mean who figured that out for the first time? Who who risked putting that on there and then having it baked onto it because because this platform does heat up.

He did, But I think not all platforms these things that he did, but this one is um And So this whole thing about the sort of the troubleshooting, open up the hood, the techie side of the people who use three D printers today, and how it seems to me most or all consumer models are it makes me think, Wow, what's it gonna be like when there is the first three D printer that is like an Apple product, it's the first three D printer that's just for people who

aren't interested in doing all this customization and troubleshooting and kind of tech fun. They don't want to go on an adventure. They just want something that works. And I I kind of predict that whoever creates that first thing and an affordable price range, obviously something that's plug and play. It's intuitive, it's totally easy. You don't have to be techie to get it. That's gonna be a gold mine,

I think, Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be huge. It'll be one of those things where just like a printer used to be outside the realm of everyone, but the early adopters who had a lot of money to spend on stuff. Now it's you know, now it's commonplace, to the point where the printers are less expensive than the toner is uh, you know, it's totally true. That's how they get you. Yeah. Yeah,

it's also how I love electronic waste gets generated. Where you're like, I'm just gonna go buy a new printer, just use the toner that comes with the new printer, and when it runs out, I'll go out and buy a new printer. Um that's not not not good uh environmental practice there, but at any rate, Yeah, when we reach that, you're really we're already seeing this this explode in the hobbyist market. When it goes beyond the hobbyist market,

it's really gonna shake things up. So let's talk about the actual process of building something you meant and that you built pyramids. Now, I'm I'm going to imagine here that since you built pyramids with specific design and specific uh logo type, or at least initialism at the base of it, I had to be helped by UFOs. That's

the only way that it could be explained. Either that or you had to make it yourself, because I can't imagine that this design just naturally existed somewhere out there already and you just uh pulled it, pulled down a virtual model and sent it to the printer. You had to build this, right, No, of course, Well, I so I have built some things, and I have imported some other things. So I'm using a couple of different programs

or cads computer aided design programs. You can design virtual objects with a lot of different kinds of CAD software, And primarily I've been using a free online program called Tinker CAD, which is pretty basic. It's not gonna get you know, you're not gonna have a lot of really complex options, but it's just simple. It's fun, it's easy to use, and it's a great resource. You can design

an object on a virtual work surface. You can import shapes, so you can just go over to the toolbar and say, I'd like to bring in a pyramid, and you can move it over and change its dimensions and add things to it, and you can group it with other shapes and un group it so that you can, like you can create more complex objects. By this grouping process. You can import letters and symbols. You can even load designs

that other users have made and made public. So after that, you you've finished with your design, you're saying, okay, here it is on my virtual workspace. I want to make this. Then you export it to a file that you can send to your three D printer, like an STL file that I think that stands for stereolithography, if that makes sense, and you export it to that file, download it to your computer. Next thing. Next thing we do with our version,

at least you take it to an interface program. So the printer we have connects to my computer with the USB cable, just standard plug in USB. I had. I had to get some drivers for it, um, but you just put it right in. You can all so takes stuff to the printer on an SD card, but I haven't done that yet, and it interfaces through a program called Replicator G. So this program takes your design and

it interprets it for the printer. So it looks at what you've designed, and then it generates a segment of what's called G code. It's a series of instructions that tell the printer, one step at a time, how to build the object you've designed. So it's sort of like it takes the whole picture and then it breaks it down into ten thousand steps. Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right, And so then you can automatically generate the g code and just click print, or you can manually edit the

g code if you want. So you can go in and you can change individual lines to the G code. I I ended up doing this when I wanted to change, uh, like certain temperature parameters. I was having a lot of trouble getting the things to stick to the platform, and I was like, oh man, what could I do? So I tried making the platform hotter. I tried making the

extruders hotter, and then low wearing the temperature. So just going in and changing things like that, changing the different parameters to see if there's one particular or maybe two particular things that are are the source of the problem. This is where we were talking about the adhesion failures. Yeah, we I have had so many adhesion failures, and I know I'm not alone. This is the thing people all

over the internet are talking about. You know, I think it's just it's it depends on what what type of material you're using, what printer you're using. But they're different problems that come up all the time, and one of them is the adhesion failure. That's where you start a print and lays down an initial layer and then it

starts trying to build up from that layer. But the problem is, say, imagine the plastic instead of laying flat on the platform while you print a new layer on top, the new layers starts sticking to the extruder, and the extruder starts pulling the entire thing around. It peels up from the platform and just follows the extruder around as the extruders continues on its way. I'm laying a new layer on but in fact, what it's doing is rolling around a ball of plastic that gets bigger and bigger, right,

and it's like plastic strands. Yeah, but so it's not a solid ball of plastics. No, it looks like a hair ball made of plastic or a tumble weed made of plastic, and uh so we've got a bunch of those. They're very funny. Yeah, And it was one of those things where you had to do the research to find out the different things that other people had tried, and you found that some of them really work really well, some of the really some that were counterintuitive, one that

that blew my mind. But this was one I saw very often. It was just, um, if you're using p l A, I think this is not so much a tip for a BS, but with p l A specifically the kind of plastic we're using. Put blue painters tape on the platform. Yep, and it worked, and I mean, here, it's great. Another problem was just that I had to watch some videos to try to see, Okay, I feel like I'm not leveling the build platform correctly because that's not the right just sense between the build platform and

the extruder. Yeah. So that's the thing that you've got to do pretty frequently with a three D printer. And I was getting frustrated because I kept having these failures, and finally I was like, Okay, I just gotta go check it out online. I watched some videos of other people leveling the build platform. They were doing it a little differently than I was. They were moving the platform closer to the extruder, actually raising it up higher. And

this was counterintuitive to me. You know. I was thinking, well, it seems like you need to give it more room to lay down the plastics, so the extruder isn't touching the plastic and peeling it up. Totally the opposite. It needed to be closer so that it could press down the initial layers and that was what would prevent it from peeling up like that. Interesting. So I was just configuring the device wrong. Um, But it was very interesting to find this out, to see how people have figured

out this problem before. And there are tons of threads on it, you know. So obviously you were not the only person and to encounter this issue. No, no, no, no, yeah, But that that again is a great example of how there's a community that's risen up around this particular technology

and it's one that is supportive. Yeah, And I get the feeling, as I was just saying earlier that a lot of the people in this community, I think a lot of them today are not the people who want it to just work necessarily, they kind of enjoy they like getting under the hood. Yeah, and I have to say it's been frustrating when it doesn't work, but it's also a lot of fun when you make something that didn't work finally work. Sure. Sure. So anyway, I sort of to back up and give the broad perspective on

three D printing today. I think consumer three D printing it has come a long way, and it's in a really cool place right now, but there is one more step, and after it makes that step, I think it will explode. Yeah. I mean in a good way, right, not explode into a million pieces, but explode into a very lucrative consumer market. And you're going to see just an equal explosion and creativity as people start to make designs of things that

when you print them, are really creative. I had talked about jokingly that we should print our own duchess and dragons dice with this thing, and uh, yeah, I printed earlier today I printed a dual color Hilbert cube, which was this cube of interlocking color designs. Because we have a dual extrud or, it can actually print in two colors at once, which is pretty cool. Yeah, but of course Jonathan ce is a six sided object and things dice. That's you can take the geek out of the game,

but you can't take the game out of the geek. Yeah. Anyway, it's it's really interesting that we have this to play with now, and we expect will continue to experiment with it. Joe is going to become a three D printing guru before too long, and well we'll send him all these Yeah, we'll just be like, hey, hey, Joe, my my, this table is a little wobbly. Can you print like a little stopper for this table? And that kind of stuff.

I mean, it's it's funny like you could think of the the seemingly minor meaningless sort of stuff you can use a three D printer for. But as we already covered the first part of this podcast, there's some really you know, like life altering potential to this technology as well, and and even stuff that you might be able to do with just a consumer printer that could be that kind of thing. You could print something that you you know, you've always needed around the house but didn't even know

you could find out there. Or the example I always like to use is imagine that you've got a piece of furniture like I've had shelving units, for example, where a particular part that joined two pipes together broke, and I think, well, where the heck am I going to find this specific thing that I need? Because otherwise this is still a perfectly working shelf. But because this one little plastic piece that joined two other metal pieces together is broken, I can't use it anymore because it's no

longer sturdy. I could go and print a replacement for it instead of having to sit there and try and find something else that would work in its place. So that's really it's you know, it's it's I've really got a lot of practical applications as well as just all the super cool stuff that you can do with it. Yeah. Well, so my bottom line is, if you're out there and you want to make yourself a fortune, I would say, become the person who makes that consumer affordable three D

printer that just works. So you heard to hear her first, folks, It's not gonna be either of us, as it turns out. All right, Well, that's been a great discussion about three D printers, a good update and description about what it's like working with one. If any of you out there have experiences working with three D printers, I want to hear all about it. Let me know. Send me an email the address you can send it to his tech

stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also drop us a line on Twitter, Tumbler, or Facebook or handle it. All three is tech Stuff h s W. You can hear Joe regularly on the Forward Thinking podcast, so if you haven't subscribed to that, go check that out. We cover all sorts of stuff. We like to really get into some crazy ideas about the future. We all have a great series about stuff you never see in science fiction films, but you totally have to wonder what

it's going to be like in the future. Um. We also occasionally just talk about Nick Cage at length as must be done. Yeah. Yeah, in no way at all necessarily related to the future. It just happens. So if that sounds appealing, you should definitely check it out and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and bath into other topics because it has to have works dot Com