There’s a piece of sand­stone inside the 3D scan­ner (bot­tom left). The com­puter screen shows the ren­dered file. The infor­ma­tion in the STL file can then be entered into the 3D printer. This stage is skipped if you have cre­ated a file from scratch (through CAD soft­ware, from an MRI, etc.)

That’s a model of a claw from the Iowa Giant Sloth sit­ting on top of the printer that the Lab made for the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa Museum of Nat­ural His­tory. Most of the lab’s work is for the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa Hos­pi­tals and Clin­ics, but they do projects for any depart­ment and the pub­lic can bring in projects for the printer as well ($8/cubic inch). Think­ing about a 3D printer for your library? This one costs $35,000.

Sam­ples of things the printer can make. It made the wheels for a Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing student’s senior design project while we were there. It took about 40 min­utes to make the wheels. Each layer is 1/10,000 of an inch thick. Imag­ine how many lay­ers are in the pros­the­sis or back mus­cle! The lay­ers are made of plas­tic that is melted (think of a glue gun) and sprayed in place. The car­tridges look quite a bit like reg­u­lar printer car­tridges (but a lot big­ger). The printer we saw can only do one colour at a time. They can change car­tridges part way through a project  to cre­ate mul­ti­coloured lay­ers (exam­ple at bot­tom of post).

When they come out of the printer, pieces are given a spe­cial hot bath to remove any of the sup­port plas­tic. Here is the body of the car tak­ing its bath.

Some­times the object that comes out of the 3D printer is used to deter­mine how to make some­thing out of a dif­fer­ent mate­r­ial. The com­puter file can be used to make the object with the CNC Mill & Lathe out of metal or other plas­tics. Unfor­tu­nately, we were not able to see this machine in action. He ran the pro­gram for the just-completed model car chas­sis on the com­puter screen so we could see how it would work. The lab does have man­ual lathes as well and Mr. Struck­man still believes it is impor­tant for the stu­dents to learn how to use these for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what the CNC (com­puter numer­i­cal con­trol) Mill & Lathe is doing. He also stressed the impor­tance of trigonom­e­try and being able to visu­al­ize things in 3D.

Then we did a quick walk through the rest of the lab to look at some very tra­di­tional tools like metal cut­ters. It took us awhile to wrap our heads around the EDM (elec­tri­cal dis­charg­ing machine). This machine sends elec­tri­cal pulses through graphite which then makes holes in metal. The piece of metal sits in an oil bath and the metal bits dis­solve into it. The machine was not work­ing when we were there and many of us got hung up on the fact that graphite is so much softer than metal. I hope I am describ­ing it some­what accurately!

And each kid received a 3D Tiger­hawk to take home! This was an amaz­ing field trip and one that I hope to repeat in the future. While the kids saw the video of the 3D printer ear­lier, see­ing how all the machines work together and the sam­ples, not to men­tion see­ing the grin on Mr. Struckman’s face when describ­ing some of his favourite projects was a whole dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. Many busi­nesses (even jew­elry stores) own them as well as uni­ver­si­ties so almost any com­mu­nity prob­a­bly has one that chil­dren could visit.