3D printing a fad or the future of accessible equipment?

With 3d printers becoming cheaper and better quality, is it time for all accessible equipment providing departments to get a couple of these little buggers and just go nuts on designing their own in house equipment?

Well lets unpack some arguments for and against this. We will start with the bad news first (rip that plaster off early so to speak). 3d printing and design can be quite a technical learning curve for those that are not initiated, especially the 3d design side.

For 3d design, I recommend fusion 360 however there are others that are apparently quite good like solid works or Blender. Setting up a printer and getting going isn’t too bad but again can be a bit of a learning curve I highly recommend looking at reviews and stat up guides on YouTube and if you can have a play around with different printers before you purchase one. There’s also an argument against 3d printing from an environmental stand point that is the printers can create a lot of waste plastic and resin because of the supports it needs to create to make a model especially more complex ones. I was going to add cost into this side of the debate, but I kind of think its an on the fence thing, on one hand they have come down in price massively or at least the price to quality ratio is better. You can get some fairly cheap good quality printers that will be more than adequate for what we would need in EAT (environmental access technology) but these are basic printers that will print in one material and have limited resolution, if you wanted something a bit more advance like a multi material printer you can start looking at that remortgage. Next of course is the running costs these days electricity isn’t cheap don’t you know and of course there’s the plastics and resins to pay for which can be quite an expensive way to go.

These problems aside I think this is one of the greatest things since sliced bread, with 3d printing now being introduced into many aspects of healthcare including surgical procedures the sky isn’t even a limit. I read an interesting article a while back where NASA needed to send a spanner up to the ISS and instead of launching a rocket they just designed it on 3d design software, sent the design to the space station and printed it in space; you can read it here. In my opinion the possibility this tech offers us far out weighs the problems associated with it. You only have to look as far as one of my favourite websites https://www.thingiverse.com/ to see the potential with hobbyist creating their own solutions to problems and if people with minimal clinical and engineering knowledge can come up with amazing solutions like the ones shown below imagine what we could do with a printer.

Another benefit of this is the ability quickly manufacture and prototype giving flexibility to designs and development multiple designs can be printed and left to print while you do something else. Also advances in 3d scanning means that we can now create custom moulds for control mounting (check out this 3d cast here).

In closing, given we can materialise a spanner in space just by sending an .stl file and we can 3d print a jaw bone, isn’t it about time we see what EAT specialist can do with a 3d printer?