This is basically an ad for a 3D printer but I don’t care, the technology is just so astounding I have to share it anyway.
Tara Anderson, a director at 3D-printing company 3D Systems, adopted Derby from non-profit dog rescue Peace and Paws. “I kept looking at his photo and reading his story, and I cried literally every time,” says Tara in the video. So she decided to do something about it and created a pair of specially fitted prosthetic legs for Derby, built in a loop configuration similar to kids’ “jumping shoes” to stop him digging them into the ground. The result is one happy dog.
H/t karmacat
Doggy!
Awwwww!
Great. Except that Tara isn’t a veterinarian, and her device could be torturing the dog for all we know. And 3D printing is a con – these “printers” are just plastic molding machines, making plastic stuff just the way all plastic toys are made anywhere. Also the plastic used in the prosthetic isn’t designed for the purpose and I would be surprised if it would last more than a week.
blbt5 @ #3:
Actually, no. A 3D printer is not a plastic molding machine because it does not use molds of any kind. A molding machine requires you create a mold into which plastic is injected. The 3D printer is simply a printer using a much thicker ink. Ink that bonds to ink printed in previous layers.
The durability of the item printed is dependent upon the ink used. The strength ranges from a low temperature and lightweight prototyping plastic that isn’t much stronger than cheap wax to inks composed of metal powders and a temporary binder. In the later case the item is baked in an oven at several thousand degrees causing the powder to fuse together and the binder to burn away. Well designed, you have to account for shrinkage and slump, you end up with an item that with stresses associated with jet turbine blades or the piston rod in a high performance piston engine.
I don’t see 3D printing as a panacea. The higher precision 3D printers can easily go for tens of thousands of dollars and the higher strength “inks” are not untypically about as expensive as a similar weight in silver. Some exotic mixes are slightly more than gold. 3D printing is not practical for most things. That said the price of the printers and “inks” are going down and even at today’s prices the ability to rapidly prototype and modify a design can save money.
NASA and the European space agency is looking at 3D printing as a way of providing replacement parts on long term mission where is is simply impractical to lift the weight in spares they may or may not need. Instead of lofting thousands of pounds on spares they could haul up a 3D printer and a few hundred pounds of “inks”. From that, and digital files with the designed, they could print up the weight in “ink” as virtually anything they really need.