 Yeah, my name is Ezra Ranz. If at any point you can't hear me, if I'm talking too fast, whatever, just raise your hand. And I will do my best to kind of accommodate that. Yeah, so as you said, my background is technically as an engineer. I studied engineering at the University of Vermont. And yeah, I kind of pursued that career for a while and have really kind of spread out and tried a number of different things. So I've also kind of started doing a lot of art and also starting my own businesses. And so I've kind of dabbled in a lot of different fields. One topic that has kind of been of interest since even before college. But yeah, I kind of got my first introduction to 3D printing in college and have dabbled in it ever since. I brought a 3D printer with me here today. So you might not be able to see it in the background. It's running here after the presentation. More than welcome to come up, take a look at it. I currently have something printing on it as we speak. So this is just kind of a home, very simple version of a 3D printer. But as we'll get into in the discussion, 3D printers come in all shapes and sizes, different types, things of that nature. Also, I have photos and stuff up here and videos of 3D printers. So yeah, anyways, with that, just wanted to say that, I guess before we start, just out of curiosity, raise of hands, who has heard of 3D printing, is familiar with 3D printing? All right, well, so a lot of people have heard of it. How about our familiar with 3D printing, like know a little bit more than maybe just have heard of it? Is that seeing one? Having seen one would be something, sure. OK. All right, cool. Well, anyways, so I will try to just speak on the very basics of 3D printing at the beginning. And then I'll just kind of go into, basically, talk about 3D printing and very broad strokes. And then we'll do a question and answer session afterwards. We can get into all the detail, gory detail that we would like to. And yeah, with that, we work in sort of old school style with the slides today. Yeah, so 3D printing, as it's more technically known as additive manufacturing. So these are essentially the same thing. 3D printing is the colloquial term and is used all the time for this process. In its simplest form, it's essentially taking a machine, something that's computer-controlled, and creating a 3D object from that. And it's called additive because the traditional way of making some part historically has always been to, say, you take a block of aluminum or a big piece of metal, and you cut away from that until you get your part. The main difference between the traditional manufacturing methods and 3D printing is that instead of you removing the material, you're actually essentially layering and adding material together to create that part. So it's sort of the reverse process of removing it. You're actually adding material. So in its simplest explanation, that's what 3D printing is. It comes in all shapes and sizes. And yeah, we'll get into that. When you're 3D printing, basically you have to have an idea of what you're trying to create in the first place. So there's kind of two main ways that you're going to create an object in a digital form before you can then create it on a 3D printer. So the first way, something that we're familiar with is scanning. So you can scan a document, for example. That would be a two-dimensional scan. There's also a number of ways to do three-dimensional scans using photography, laser scanning. There's basically any sensor you can get that information from. You can create a 3D object in a digital space, on a computer, for example. That's one way. And the other way is actually, so this is used primarily for things that already exist, objects that already exist. So you can scan a person. You can scan a face. You can scan a cup. Any number of things, there's all sorts of limitations and intricacies of how that works. But in general terms, you can scan an existing object. What you can also do is go into a computer program, not all too dissimilar from something like a Photoshop or even if you want to really boil it down to something like a word processor, where you're essentially, you're taking a bunch of tools and you're creating something in that. So you can write a summary or a report. In this case, in Photoshop, for example, you take a bunch of layers. You can add photos together, cut away parts, paint on top of it. In this, generally what you're talking about is computer aided design. It's a very broad category. There's lots of different types, lots of nuances in that. But with CAD, with computer aided design, you're essentially able to create any sort of 3D object that you want on a computer. So this is one example. This is a program that I use a lot in my work called On Shape. This one's kind of designed more for people with sort of an engineering background. There's all sorts of other programs, ones that are meant to be incredibly accessible. So like a kid, six years old, could pick up a computer and start playing around with it. There's all sorts of CAD programs that architects will use to design buildings or animators will use to create characters that you'll see in a lot of movies that come out now. These are all computer aided design. They all have kind of their strengths and weaknesses and kind of focuses that they do. This is just one example of a computer aided design program. And I show this one, it's what I use. It's used for a lot of practical, technical things like that, although I've started to use it also in more creative ways, which is also making me kind of look into other types of CAD programs that I was not familiar with before that are now used more for animation and things that kind of have different requirements. So when you're talking about 3D printing, it's a term used for a lot of different technologies, processes, you're talking about sizes. Just a simple thing, things you can 3D print. This is a microscopic 3D printed element, for example. So that's a needle head. And this would be the object here blown up or magnified even more. So that's kind of the small scale of what something could be 3D printed. On kind of the other side of that stuff that's currently available, there are 3D printers that will print housing structures. So this is sort of the range of just sizes of things that are currently being 3D printed. One could presume sometime in the future, they could probably go a lot larger than this, or they might be completely mobile. And on the smaller side, you're talking about things that would have potentially a lot of implications for nanoscale applications, things like health care, biomaterials, things like that, where you could do things that are very small that could, say, go in your veins or any number of different possibilities. On that front, these are just a couple photos of different types of printers. This one right here is actually the printer that you see right here on the floor that's currently printing. This is sort of like a hobby level 3D printer. And it's something that's quite accessible. These go for under $1,000. So it's sort of in the realm of something you might get like an office printer, a Xerox or something like that. You can have the office to do something. This is now accessible today. There are any range of 3D printers. This one's about $1,000. There's ones that you can get for $100. And there's printers that you can get for a couple million dollars. So there's kind of a huge range of what's possible and available for 3D printers. This, for example, would be sort of an industrial setting. I don't know exactly what type it is, but it might be a metal 3D printer. You can do large batches of smaller metal components. And then this would be, this is another type of printer. So there's a lot of different types. This one's actually essentially mounted on a robotic arm. And it's using that. And this is actually creating a housing structure of some sort. I don't know exactly what, but yeah. You have sort of an idea of sort of the different form factors they come in. They can be as large as houses. They can look like robots. They even have ones now that are mounted on wheels. So they're totally mobile. And then there's ones like this that are small that you can carry. I brought it in my car today. You can just set up, plug in, and start printing. And they all can adapt to different materials. When you said like you could put a metal in it, this one appears to have some plastic. Yeah, we'll actually get into that. So this is an example of a 1.3D printer. This is one that's essentially like a robotic arm. And they mount essentially the same thing that's happening here, but on the end of a robotic arm. So it's a different form factor. And this is one that's kinda used to create a lot of, I would say more architectural models at this point. But the beauty of this is that it allows you to create things of incredible geometric intricacies. And also just like allows you to create things that were not possible using kind of traditional manufacturing processes. So yeah, this is one company called AI Build out of the UK. There's companies all over the world doing very interesting things in a number of different aspects. So this is just kind of one example of that. Yeah, so speaking on materials for 3D printers. So this is something that when a lot of people started, I think to hear about 3D printing in the first place was there was a period in about 2012, 2013, where there was kind of a lot of hoopla. There was, it was getting hyped a lot 3D printing. There was this kind of the advent of the possibility of having like desktop 3D printing. Where I think the promise was essentially that you could just have this printer on your desk and it would create anything you could possibly want. Right there on your desk. And so there was a lot of hype around it. The thing with hype is that there was some truth to it, but at the same time, there was a lot of, let's just say complications and complexity that was not totally being appreciated at that moment. So what happened was essentially, like what I have right here is essentially what was available back then starting to become available. But what it doesn't do, like it doesn't do everything. It has limitations to what I can do. It's like a hammer. You can use it really well for some things, for other projects, other types of work that you're doing. It's not always the best tool. So as with 3D printing, they have limitations, but they also, yeah, they tend to be fairly flexible as long as you know what those limitations are. So it's things about like accuracy, strength of parts, knowing what the materials are that you're gonna be using and adapting what you're doing for that purpose. So this printer here that I have right now is used, basically only uses plastics. So this is kind of one of the main limitations within plastics. There's a ton of variety as well. This is something that you get into fairly quickly when you look at 3D printing. There's, if you look at all the stuff around, I mean, there's plastic everywhere now. A lot of, basically all the plastics that are here are essentially heat modulated. So essentially what's happening with this one, it's essentially the equivalent of like a hot glue gun, except instead of glue, you're using plastic. And instead of using your hand to move it around and lay down some glue, it's basically computer controlled. So there's a couple of motors in it that move the gun, the heat gun around and deposits the material onto this plate. So yeah, when we're talking about materials, that's the limitation of this one. It really is only good for a variety of plastics and not every plastic. It's really limited to certain plastics that this printer will do. On the flip side, when you're talking about 3D printing as a whole, you can do things like food. So anything you can kind of extrude, like if you've done frosting on a cake or something like that through this nozzle, that would be an example of something that could probably be 3D printed if you set it off such that this icing device was connected to some motors and an arm. Foods are becoming quite popular. You can do things like chocolate, which can be melted and then solidify again. A lot of it, a lot of the limitations with 3D printing come down to the materials that are being used. And a lot of the complexity that is created a lot of times has to do with the materials. And so this is one thing that the, well, anyway, sorry. So anyways, so this was one of the promises that was made that you could kind of create anything on your desktop. And a lot of it wasn't appreciating the fact that if you wanna create anything, you need to have all those materials possible. You really need to have command of how to work with those materials. So when you're talking about 3D printing, you can do foods. This is like, these are chocolate roses that were 3D printed, plastics. That's like what I'm doing right now. I'm printing a carabiner, actually, on this printer at this moment. You can do things like metals. This is what a lot of people have heard of. It's sort of, yeah, a nice, slightly controversial element of like, yeah, you can print 3D printed guns. To be fair, you can't really do this on a home hobby printer yet. People have messed around and made modified versions that you could build, say, 95% of it on a printer like this. They don't look like a standard handgun. So you have to sort of adapt designs to work with the 3D printers. And then also, a lot of the really fascinating stuff is also happening, most of it's in, I would say, very much experimental phases on things like biomaterials. So building scaffolding for skin grafts or any number of things, structures for, say, an ear replacement. They're also working on things that are straight up organs. So working on 3D printing, things like hearts. A lot of this stuff, definitely not kind of mainstream by any means. A lot of it's in the works, it's experimental phase, but the prospect is that this might be possible at some point in the future. So as far as 3D printing goes, there's always this, the concept of 3D printing is really, the idea maybe has been around a lot longer. But the actual implementation of something like 3D printing really started, I would say in the early 80s with stereolithography, which essentially takes a ultraviolet sensitive resin and essentially exposes it to a light. So you can use something like a projector or a laser to solidify this resin. So that's kind of how 3D printing started. And it's really kind of branched out to a number of different types of 3D printing and different fields, things of that nature. And industries have started to adopt it. So I'm just gonna give you a kind of a brief overview of really where 3D printing is currently being used. And then yeah, there's any number of fields where it might be, ideas at some point, everybody will use it. But that's, yeah, definitely not the case at where we're at today. So as far as industries go, thank you. The main space where 3D printing has really taken a huge foothold is in prototyping. So prototyping is essentially creating the first versions of what eventually becomes a product, a service, whatever you're doing. So it's something that I use 3D printing for a lot. You create any object. So I'm just gonna talk about prototyping more generally, but this happens in Fortune 500 companies, startups, artists, bakers, whatever. All these people are using 3D printing to essentially create kind of the rough drafts. In the design process, what you're doing is prototyping. You're making tweaks. So you have an idea, you wanna create something and you're making tweaks along the way. And where the benefit of 3D printing has really, I think become apparent is that the turnaround between when you have the idea, when you make those changes and then when you can actually have that part in front of you and take a look at it, kind of that cycle, that lead time from in the old days, you might have to send it off to a machine shop and two or three weeks later, you might have that part or you can rush it, have it the next day but spend tons of money on that part. With 3D printing, the real benefit has come from being able to essentially take those ideas, print them out and say the next day or maybe a few hours later, you have that part, you can test it. And so what it really does is allows you to rapidly increase the amount of time that it takes to develop any idea. And so that's really where it started. 3D printers were prohibitively expensive and not that capable. 20, 30 years ago, only kind of a few use cases where they're there. Now these things, there's kind of a confluence of a lot of different fields that are allowing 3D printing to really become much more accessible and usable. Material science being one of the big ones is figuring out how these materials work and can be 3D printed. There's tons of work going into that. The cost of electronics, generally speaking, you can buy essentially all the electronics that go into this for probably under $25 that will then drive this. 20 years ago, I would have been much more expensive. Could have been done, but it was not kind of available to kind of your standard person designing something. So with prototyping, that's really kind of where this is now being used all over the place in a lot of different companies and places that were not even, yeah, I don't think necessarily even saw this coming, but they're realizing, oh, this is very accessible. And then there's just, yeah, both the software to design things or the possibility of 3D scanning something. People that don't even have a lot of the technical knowledge can now go ahead and print things. And so that's really, that's the part where I've been using it a lot, but there's also, if we go into the kind of the next stages, there are some industries where they're actually being used to create real parts for four of componentry in any number of devices. So aerospace and automotive fields are areas where a lot of development happens, where development is actually quite expensive. And so this is an example of a rocketry company based out of, I think, Los Angeles, and they're printing a header tank out of titanium here. And so they're using kind of a few different robotic arms with different heads, nozzles on them that are growing around and essentially fabricating this in one piece. And so what it allows you to do is, yeah, you might need a huge machine shop to build something like this or you can have a few robots with some material and do that. There's a lot of complexity in doing this, but there's certain fields, aerospace being one, automotive, where you have incredibly, I would say incredible amounts of money being poured into development, creating new parts, updating, improving different things. And this allows them to do this both very quickly, very precisely, and especially in fields like aerospace where there's a lot of intricacies in the geometry of these items. It allows you to create that geometry for relatively little costs compared to traditional methods. You could take this, lots of metal welded together, but what it allows you to do is create all those complexities right into the model and then it prints it because once it gets essentially the coordinates for where those parts are going, that's all it really needs. There are limitations, but this is just one example of what they're doing right now. I mean, this probably was printed about a year ago or so. And the aim of this company is to essentially be able to 3D print an entire rocket from start to finish and guarantee that as an engineer, I'm familiar like this would be incredibly difficult to do, but that's kind of their aim. At some point there, essentially what they're doing is they'll take a nozzle, a rocket nozzle, which has a lot of complex tubing and stuff for cooling and injecting the fuel into it. What they're doing now, instead of taking all these parts in traditional way, there might be a thousand parts. What you can do with 3D printing is you can actually drill that down and now that part that previously took a thousand parts, all assembled, hand assembled, all these potential failure points, you can now print this thing potentially at the same like one piece because you can include all that complexity just directly in the computer file that you're creating. Other fields, so this is one that's actually becoming more and more adopted on a, I would say almost a mainstream level now is in dentistry. It's a huge one for anything between dentures to surgical guides, to retainers, things like this. There are printers now that will do these things and they're essentially being able to mass produce custom things like this. Because what happens is you can have, in the old method you would essentially old manufacturing, not even old, they're currently used as well. Just depends on what you're doing. But yeah, with these you essentially need to have everyone custom formed to a person and what you can do with this is you can then take that and say with a retainer where you have to have kind of a series of steps, you can design all of that in a computer and then print every single one of these say aligners all in one go and then the person can receive them and they have their say 12 months of retainers lined up for them and it's all, it was all created on a computer and you don't have to go every time in to mold a fit. So this is stuff that is, I would say not available everywhere but there is a company called I think Align Technologies that is now doing this and they're basing their whole company on essentially digital dentistry where you can essentially take a scan of your mouth and then you have some people behind the scenes I don't know exactly who it is but like a dentist designer person that can go in essentially design your mouth plan, print it all out and then you get your devices for fixing your teeth. Yeah. That would be plastic? Yeah, so these are plastics. To be fair, I don't know the exact type of plastic but this would be, you can tell from how they've printed it here this is using some sort of resin curing technology. So this is quite different from this printer that I have here. Essentially you have like a bath of resin, you have either a laser projector underneath that and you have essentially a bed but like a block that it then cures this material onto and it pulls it essentially out of the resin bath. So I'm trying to think, actually there is a video. So next step please, I think the next one's a video. So this is a company called Carbon. They're one of the, they're a startup company they've been around I think for four or five years but they're really trying to take resin curing to the next level with the primary industry being things like dentistry but they also have ideas of doing kind of mass customization for people for companies like Adidas, Nike, sportswear companies where you can do a lot of very intricate designs right here. So you can see this is just sort of a span of some of the different elements of how these are created. It's happening very quickly but the idea is that you're essentially allowed to do a lot of this design work in a digital space, print it out and it's creating a kind of new workflow and the idea is that you can then scale this up so that you're doing products for any number of people. So yeah, this is one example, resin curing. Their main technology was that they learned how to do this resin curing but actually learned how to do it very quickly using kind of a very intricate process that's different from standard resin curing. So there's all these sort of minute changes and tweaks of kind of a standard process that was developed 30 years ago that allows them to do these things and do them very quickly. So you can take something, essentially print it overnight and you could send it out the next day if they figure out their logistics well enough to do all of that. But what this is really allowing is for kind of mass customization which is really where a lot of the 3D printing comes into play, you have a more traditional method like injection molding, you create the mold and then you can make thousands, millions of a part for incredibly cheap. So that's where something like that is incredibly valuable. But if you had to make thousands of different mouth forms, that would be, I mean, most of the expense happens on the front end with kind of traditional manufacturing. With this, you can really modify it as much as you want. So that's where a lot of the promise is. This is not everywhere, there's still, I mean, you can't do everything with it but the idea is like this is now becoming available and it's here. So as far as other industries go, there's a lot of design fields, fashion for example, being able to essentially design what you want on a computer and then print the object. You can do stuff that just wasn't possible before with the kind of level of detail that was not possible before. What material is clothing? What material is clothing? Well, clothing can be any number of materials, right? There's a lot of different types. And so a lot of what's created here I think is actually not the entire dress necessarily but it's a lot of the detail parts that go on it. You can have fashion accessories, whatever. These things can be designed on a computer and then printed out where it might take somebody who knows, six months to design and create something with the same complexity now that same person can design on a computer and then start it printing, go home and then the next morning it's printed out for you. I mean, this is sort of the promise. A lot of it in the fashion industry for example is very much still, I would say, more on the less on the even research phase but on the prototyping stage where you're really creating one-off unique pieces. That's where a lot of this is happening right now but the idea is that at some point once they figure out the materials, manufacturing methods, things like that, that this could become more available for even just average folks like us. Other one, prosthetics. This is one that's actually fascinating because like in dentistry, there's a lot of customization and fit that needs to happen for individuals. Prosthetics is one huge field where 3D printing is making a big impact both for underprivileged folks who just don't like can't have access to a very expensive healthcare system and get fancy prosthetics. Like actually on this printer here, they have designs for prosthetic hands and feet that you can literally download from the internet like you would a image file or a PDF from an email. You can download that, load it onto the printer and print it and then you can assemble it and you have a prosthetic. So there's nothing really perfect about this but what it's really doing is allowing for these possibilities that just weren't there before. Like I have a cousin for example who studied biomechanical engineering, did a lot of her work on her PhD on prosthetics and they were 3D printing all these items because they could essentially rapidly iterate these things because they were doing a lot of testing both for strength, durability, things like this and they were able to do that using 3D printing and also custom fitting them to each patient that they were working with. So this is really where a lot of the fascinating work is happening but it's also cool because there's a lot of research and development happening on kind of the early stages of 3D printing but it's also becoming more and more available in things like consumer products. One big initiative that is happening right now, almost all of the companies, Nike, Adidas, they're all now creating shoes using 3D printing techniques and so this is in development. They actually have lines of printers that are printing these and people can buy them. It's like one line of their shoe and they create millions of shoes every year but this is just one example of like a new line that they're doing where the entire sole is 3D printed. At some point, theoretically, the entire shoe could be 3D printed but you have this kind of combination of materials that creates a lot of complexity when you're trying to 3D print something. I'm not sure they coax you. I don't know exactly but I guarantee you they're not cheap. My guess is probably two to $300 for something like this but with that, the company that you saw, Carbon, that did the dentistry video, they also have a version that will do things like this and so they're actually the main company working with Adidas to do this. There's a lot of companies in the space all doing a number of different things but this is just kind of one example of like this is being created now. It's early stages. Most of us probably won't be buying 3D printed shoes for a few more years at least but if you really wanted to have the latest, greatest thing, you could go find this now. So these are actually projects that I'm working on. These are prototypes of ideas that I have to do kinetic sculptures and all these objects are 3D printed. So I'm using, so this is some of the art engineering work that I'm doing on the side so I'm actually developing mechanical flowers and these exploding sculptures and once again, it's just kind of a fun little side project of mine but I'm able to do this because I can, at home, I can design a lot of the stuff on a computer. Well, I have the idea, I sketch it out, then I create it on the computer and then I can start printing it out and then once I have it printed, I can put the pieces together and this is just kind of a fun. There's intricacies and levels of detail that myself as a pretty terrible craftsperson, I just like don't have the technique to like say cut that out of wood or something like that but I can have the precision on the computer. I can then print this out and start playing with it and so is there any chance we can get the other video to go, I don't know how that, okay, perfect. Yeah, yeah, so these are sort of two lines of like art products that I'm creating. This is fairly straightforward. It's a mechanical flower essentially and what I'm trying to do is create these flowers but not basically make it look like a flower. These are rough prototypes but the idea is to essentially have a flower that looks like a flower but that I can kind of control to have bloom sort of on command and have it be interactive is the idea. So these are all 3D printed components here. It's hooked up to a motor which was not 3D printed but all these parts that you see right here were all 3D printed. This one is more of a conceptual piece that I'm doing but the idea is that you're essentially, it's an egg shape, I'm exploding the egg and then it's reforming and so it's, yeah it's more of a concept art installation piece but yeah. Are the pieces, so what you can't totally see it's sort of a stylized video but there's actually lines here so there are tension lines that they're running on. These are also connected to individual motors so each piece has a motor controlling it and yeah so they're not just floating in space. Each one is sort of individually controlled using some motors. Yeah so both these could be held in your hand theoretically, this one might be about this tall when it opens up it's maybe as big as my hand would be and then this one the egg itself is probably roughly about the same size but the structure it's in is actually would yeah, maybe roughly the size of the podium here where the egg itself is that size but then the idea is that it can blow up, become completely abstracted and then reform is the idea. So yeah and I think with that, that is kind of, that's really the basic overview of what 3D printing is and I figured it might be really helpful to just have you shoot me questions, comments, whatever because a lot of the interest I have is like you can't really cover everything about 3D printing in a quick conversation. Yeah, you mentioned the aerospace industry and I thought of following this recent adventures but the question is obviously car manufacturers and airplane companies like Boeing and then whoever makes rockets also have, there's a, I was wondering if there's, it's gonna change the relationship if there is one between government which is trying to make sure that these are safe and I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Changes the relationship between Well I guess my question is are people using 3D printing in like car manufacturing now? Yeah they are, I think the, so the thing with 3D printing is it's one more manufacturing process so it doesn't really necessarily change the relationship between say an automotive company and the safety regulator. It's still a part that's coming out of it and then it needs to be tested and they have a process for testing that so it's not really circumventing that in any way, shape or form. It's just essentially one more tool kit that they can use to create something. So I don't necessarily, one thing that it does allow companies to do is sort of vertically integrate their processes where maybe before it was more difficult to. So to some degree it might change the relationship between say the automotive company and a supplier of theirs. Potentially they're, yeah it might just change the relationship there. But yeah it's more just of a tool that kind of like fits into sort of existing workflows for the most part but it does certainly change the way people go about creating and designing things. Yeah. When I first read about this 67 years ago my first thought was oh good things can be produced on site and we get all those trucks off the highway that are moving digits and gadgets all over the place. Yeah. But you've opened your possibilities of prototypes and models and experiments. Has anybody used it just to create their parts there so they don't have to have them shipped? Absolutely, I think that's one of the big things. A company I was working for and actually this is where I got my start in entrepreneurship. I had a manufacturing company in San Diego and one of our main suppliers was a Chinese machine shop and they did incredible work and also the reason why we used them it was a fraction of the price for the machine shop that was literally right next door to us. The main disadvantage with that was that we'd send the parts out and it might be four, five, six weeks before we get those parts. Really what happened is that that's actually where I started really looking into like how can we cause we were doing that for prototyping and developing and I was like this is taking way too long. That's really where I started being like there needs to be another way. I knew of 3D printing hadn't really gotten into it in any significant way but found one that was accessible. I didn't buy one but I found a place that had one available and I started essentially 3D printing parts in San Diego where I was and was able to get those parts essentially overnight or I could just go in the afternoon, print something and I could test it that evening. This was something that just wasn't possible and so as far as being able to do stuff onsite not having to ship that's really the promise. With this printer that's going right now looks like it finished. I can design the part at home. I can print it and then one hour later I have the part, I can test it see if it's working and if it's not working which happens all the time in development things don't work how you want things break. There's interferences between parts. I can find that out immediately. Make the changes and then try again. Whereas before I would have to wait three weeks get the part, realize oh it doesn't work do the same process. You can see how that kind of exponentially changes the rate at which you're developing something. The one place I know that's using it around here is the birds of Vermont Museum and they have their model birds produced by digital printing rather than carved out of wood which is a time saving. And then they paint on the feathers but I haven't heard of it being used around Vermont much, do you know what it is? Yeah, there are people using it. There is, if you're talking aerospace there's a company, a startup company in Berlin called Benchmark. Systems are creating small nozzles for satellites. I don't actually know what exactly they're 3D printing but yeah, that's just one example. I'm 3D printing here in Vermont. If you've ever been to Generator there's a makerspace in Burlington that has those available. Actually a couple of these printers as well as some more. Available to members that are there. It's kind of a community workshop. That's just a few examples. I have another, I can give you another example. I have a relative of works at Burton, snowboards you know and they're in Burlington and they're also all the way around the world. But what I saw them doing was for a very high level, a professional if there's such a thing, snowboarding, they make the boards but then they have to custom make the boot that would go along with that body type and weight and shape and all that as well as the. So it seems to me that those are gonna be like the one, every one of those is different from the other. And I actually have to ask my relative that has changed the production. It may have or it may not have but. So that was pretty interesting. It was a good example. When I was at the University of Vermont they were actually one of the companies that would come and actually talk to us engineering folks about kind of their development process. And they were one of the first people that I saw actually doing stuff with 3D printing. So it's definitely, they do it all the time. Yeah, another example is a Subaru. They have a rally team that's based out of Vermont. They do a lot, I mean they're car racing essentially but they're 3D printing all sorts of components for their vehicles because you can reduce the weight of parts, for example. I wonder if there are any maker spaces in the area open to the public or if anybody here knows of a move to establish one? Yeah, it's a good question. Here in Montpelier I'm not entirely sure. I mean there's local 64, which is more of a co-working space. I know they had a laser cutter which is sort of in the same vein as like a desktop 3D printer. I don't know if they have a 3D printer at this moment but. Yeah. Yeah, it was the Alters Library, the area has one. Okay, there you go. Library and Berry, they have a 3D printer, yeah. Yeah, it's the same in books. So the materials that have to be in the product is going to be made out of it. At some point have to be liquid, liquid by. Yeah, so that's a great example. We can talk about it right this second. So this is, I'll just reel it up here so you can see. So this is what just printed this component here but essentially what's happening, this is a plastic, this is an ABS plastic. This is kind of, it's a fairly standard. You see it in parts all the time, parts that are injection molded. But this is an ABS material. You get it in reels. It's basically just a string of plastic. And what happens is it's going down and there's a heated nozzle down there. It's essentially using the exact concept as like a hot glue gun. It's being, the plastic gets pushed into the nozzle and it liquefies it. And a lot of the, the control happens in knowing how quickly it can print the part such that it solidifies, it liquefies and solidifies at the right rate to create the part. And so that's really, but that's it essentially. Once they figure out that, then you can print whatever you want. And so this is just one example. It will do a number of different types of plastics. This is just one example. But yeah, so it gets liquefied and then it solidifies as soon as it starts cooling down. Like how are they made from metal? They will have to be also out of heat. So this is a great example. So when you're talking materials, there's different types of 3D printing. It doesn't, so with metal they don't, it's not like say welding for example where you have like a rod, it gets super heated and then solidifies. With a lot of the 3D, they actually do have elements of that within 3D printing. But the standard way for them to 3D print metals is actually you get metal powder. So instead of it being in like a real like this where it's extruded, you get like a metal powder that's a combination of some different materials. It's rarely a pure material. And what happens is you use lasers on that to instantaneously melt and then solidify one area of the metal. And what happens is you do this all over in certain patterns and it builds it up layer by layer and that's how you can create a metal part. So it's a, conceptually it's the same thing but there's a lot of differences between say a metal 3D printer where you're gonna create a handgun with versus something like this where it's, this is taking a rod of plastic, melting it, solidifying it, they're using a powder. So there's, yeah, a lot of different ways. Sometimes it's a resin so it's a complete liquid when you start and then you solidify it. Two things, one is that costs about $1,000 but what about the role of the plastic that you have to replace every now and again and what kind of maintenance on the machine over time and how long does that last before you have to get another one or, and second part would be how much technical information someone would have to have because you have to input a lot of stuff into a computer. So who's gonna, how do you learn all that stuff and where does that come in? Yeah. For the hobbyist, let's say, when you're in this room, when it gets started. How do you- Sure. So there's a number of different levels at which you can get into this. There's some that are incredibly easy to get into, some that take a little bit more time. So if you wanna learn how to design something from the ground up using a CAD system, it's like any program it will take time. You can jump in, you have to sort of like not be afraid. Or if you're afraid, you just have to do it. Like be afraid the whole time, but you're doing it. Like that's how you learn these things. I mean, that's how I learned essentially because I took a brief class at college where they sort of gave some instructions. There's so many resources online to learn stuff. You can watch YouTube videos, whatever it is on how to create these things on a computer. At a much simpler level, there's huge libraries, digital libraries online that you can go to and download stuff other people have designed. So for example, this part that I just printed, this is a carabiner printed in two parts. So you can just kind of pop it off the plate here. So I didn't design this part. I went to a library online. I downloaded the file just like you had an image or an attachment on email. And I was able to take that document, load it in the software and change a couple settings, black and white, double-sided. I mean, you have sort of a similar set of settings that you have with a 3D printing software. Once you have the part, whether you designed it yourself or if you just got it from somebody else, you adjust some settings and then you can print it out. So it can be as simple as that. You don't actually have to know any design if you want a 3D print. I will say just from my experience, the real power and where my mind starts, where my creativity comes out is realizing that when you can do that design, you can create anything you want, essentially. Knowing the limitations, but I'm not limited. I can create a flower that opens up and closes. I can create this weird sculpture that explodes and then comes back together. Yeah, so to create those designs, definitely it's like learning Photoshop or any computer program. It takes some time. Is that printer compatible with the laser? If you want to just laser something, then you have to have a laser that picks up the image as well. Like the first slide you showed me. Oh, for scanning? It's like you were doing somebody's face, but is that compatible with the laser? Yeah, so how that works is usually scanning is like a separate process. Like your printer is usually not your scanner. Sometimes they have them combined. But generally speaking, you would create the scan. You then get a digital version on your computer and then you can take that digital version, load it into the printer software and then print that. To be fair, it's not usually that simple. There are, some softwares are more complicated than others, but so if you're gonna scan a face, you might have to clean it up because a lot of the scanning, depending on the software you're using or the actual scanner you're using, it won't be perfect right after the scan. You might have to clean some stuff up. Might have to make some changes to make it possible to 3D print. But I wasn't trying to get bogged down in too much of the details because there are, to be fair, a lot of complexities within 3D printing. But if you just kind of zoom out a little bit, you can scan, get that object, change the settings and print it like at the simplest, in the simplest way. You have a question with the mate, is it after the machine? Yeah. So this is something that I've had fun with. Depending on the printer you get, some can be incredibly expensive and difficult to repair, some are much easier. This one's great. It's a sort of an open source 3D printer. So I could go online and I could download all the part libraries for this. I can get all the electrical schematics for this printer. So if you have some technical know-how or just do it yourself type of person, you can figure out how to repair this. I actually, so I have a second one of these at home as well. I had an issue during one of the prints where, I'm trying to remember exactly what happened. So the part didn't print onto the bed, it actually pulled off. Sometimes that happens because maybe the plate was too cold or maybe it was dirty. There's kind of any number, maybe the design was wrong and wasn't designed to work properly as a 3D print. These are all kind of things as you learn. But what happened was all the plastic instead of creating a cool functional carabiner, like that's for example, it started just extruding the plastic. It didn't have a sensor that told it not to. And so I came back like four hours later. This is usually reliable enough that I can just print it, leave, come back and it's done. But in this case, it didn't work. Extruded a huge blob of plastic and kind of wrapped a huge section of the 3D printer in this plastic and then cooled down. So I was like, oh, I didn't know what to do. It was the first time that it really happened to me. I had had smaller instances but this one it was like, my printer was encased in molten plastic essentially. And in the process of trying to take off the plastic, I damaged it a little bit. So this is just kind of a worst case scenario of what could happen. But because it's an open source thing, I was able to buy a couple of replacement parts. I am daring enough that I took it apart, took out the parts that were damaged, put new parts in and this is the printer that was damaged and it's working. Basically as new again. To be fair, not everybody would be so daring to just like jump in and try to repair that. You might have to replace it. It's like anything, they do get damaged. Generally speaking, I got this just because after reading a lot, I kind of settled on this one because of the sort of open source nature. You can buy materials that are, like this is not from the same, the material that I'm printing on is not the same material from, it's not from the same company. It's open source. You can get a reel of this. This is one kilogram of plastic for, it's about $20. And I've had this for like two years. So I have a bunch of different materials that I use. So I kind of swap them in and out and this will do a number of different materials. So for relatively cheap, you can, I mean, credit a carabiner. This is maybe 20 cents of material here. So it's like, it's not free, but it's also not prohibitively expensive in a lot of instances. And so a lot of that comes down to just like, yeah, understanding what you're trying to do. The materials question, Ryder, it seems suddenly I thought I could get rich by getting into materials department for these guys. I mean, you're making food. What company is making a book that comes out as food or with a metal powder? Do you see the graduate member of that one? Plastics, yeah. How does that work? Well, yeah, so with this they're, so like I said, 3D printing is kind of huge industry. There's a lot of variety in it. There's a lot of companies that make the printers and sort of have like the razor blade kind of business model where they also sell them the materials, which are very specific to a type of machine. This one's very open source. It's kind of, it's a hobby level thing. So it's very open, but there are a lot of printers that also use proprietary materials. So only the company that makes it has that material and it will only work there. So with this one, I don't think it would work that great, but theoretically what you could do, you could use the same printer, and this is where a lot of the do-it-yourself people come in. They will remove the nozzle that's on here and you could change it out with like a, it's like an icing type thing and you just have to have a mechanism that will like squeeze out the icing. But this is the kind of flexibility and opportunity that's there, if you wanna pursue that. For me personally, that's not something that I'm gonna spend a lot of time on. I have to also prioritize where I'm gonna spend my time, but some people might be super passionate about that. And that's where that opportunity is. You might come back and your whole family will be wrapped in chocolate. I know how terrible that would be. I have to lick it clean. I mean, it's not gonna be too long till this is gonna change the relationship between the manufacturer, the retailer, and the consumer. At some point, Nike's gonna shut down all of its factories and all around the world when they can mass produce, if they can mass produce through 3D printing or something else. I mean, it's definitely a part of it, yeah. I think it's like AI. We don't know where it's gonna go, but it's not gonna be that long. Maybe my lifetime is definitely yours. Well, I mean, just an example, Adidas, and I think they just made an announcement a couple of days ago, but they were sort of piloting a program where they were essentially using 3D printers to print things onsite, customized on demand in a number of locations. They're actually shutting it down because I think they realized there were some complexities that they hadn't worked out. But the idea is that you could theoretically have a shoe printing 3D printer here in Montpelier or wherever the market so deems, you could have it in China, you could have it wherever in India, and this, and it could print there onsite theoretically shoes that are designed for that specific market. There's definitely a lot of changes that will kind of develop as a result of just the way that you can create something. Exactly how that'll look, no idea, but we'll see, I mean, it's happening.