3D Printers are seemingly everywhere these days. You can build your own, go to one of the Tech Shops around the country, and there even was a “pop-up” store that came to midtown Manhattan in December and offered dozens of objects for sale, along with the opportunity to watch several printers in action creating them.
But as 3D printers become more popular, their cost has plummeted. Helping to drive the cost down to less than $500 is various open source designs. But one thing that is still pretty pricey is the plastic resin that is used as “ink” or the raw materials for the printers to use to create their objects. The plastic can cost $25 per pound, which is about ten times what the raw source material goes for.
That may be a thing of the past, thanks to an octogenarian inventor from Washington State, and a winner in a recent contest earlier this month called the Desktop Fabrication Competition. The inventor is Hugh Lyman, from Enumclaw, Wash. He won $40,000 and an FS Laser Cutter, a Shapeoko CNC Mill and a 3D printer, supplied by Inventables.com. Along with Inventables, the contest was also sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation and the Maker Education Initiative. The competition began last May, and received several designs for devices to cut down on the cost of producing plastic filaments that could be spooled and used in a variety of 3D printers.
Lyman came across the contest last summer and built a first design in Autocad that he submitted in September, but was rejected due to documentation omissions. He reworked his design, called the Lyman Filament Extruder II, and that turned into the winning entry. The competition required that the bill of materials cost no more than $250 and be easily reproduced. Lyman posted his design on Thingiverse and since then it has been download more than 12,000 times. He is no stranger to the popular 3D “maker” website (here is a link to some of his other inventions).
I spoke to Lyman, who I found is quite a character. He told me that he was a C student in school and never finished college: “Not because I was dumb, I just couldn’t afford it.” He likes to create things and latched onto 3D printing early on.
His idea was to fill a hopper full of the raw plastic source material, melt it, and then shape it in the form of the filament. The filament is then spooled up and used by the printer to shape the final objects.
Lyman is the holder of eight patents. His first one was a mobile cabinet design that won the bid for Denver schools back in 1967. “I haven’t made any money from my patents. But I did write the last five patent applications myself, which was quite a learning process,” he said. But in the last decade or so, he has grown tired of patenting his ideas. “It isn’t worth it anymore, I would rather open source things now.”
He has messed around with 3D printers for some time. He built his first one from a kit, and then has cannibalized that one to build a second and now third printer in his workshop. His current one can print 3D objects that are smaller than 300x300x225 mm, which is quite large.
He has printed statues of Greek goddesses, and things that he sells on eBay, parts for a computer controlled router, and jewelry. One of his more popular items he calls a “Stretchlet — I gave the first one to my wife and she wore it around town and got great reaction to it.” But being a kind person, his wife would give the bracelet to her admirers. “So I would have to print her up another one.” So far he has done more than a dozen of them.
To get an idea of how his extruder has helped to drive the cost of 3D printing down, Lyman estimates his bracelet used to cost 15 cents in materials. Since he created his extruder, the price has dropped to a mere two cents. Imagine that big a decrease on more complex and heavier plastic parts.
He left me with this thought: “It is impressive that younger people are doing hi tech stuff, but it doesn’t make any difference how old you are if you keep your mind sharp and stay active.” Truer words were never said.