Key3D Western Canada’s Premier 3D Printing Provider

Article Source: Vancouver Sun
By: Michael McCullough

It looks like a beat-up old photocopier. And if you think your printer is slow, don’t bother waiting around for this one to finish. Running off a single copy will take several hours.

Then there’s the price. Each copy costs from $50 to a couple of hundred dollars. Try stuffing that in a coin slot at Kinko’s.

But this computer printer, tucked away in the back of an architect’s office near Granville Island, is unique in Western Canada and one of only a hundred or so around the world.

It prints in three dimensions.

Load a three-dimensional architectural design into its computer, and it will make a model of a house out of plaster
and resin. Load a concept for an engine part, and it will make an engine part.

“The futurists’ vision is maybe having one of these printers on every desktop and you go shopping on the Internet and you print whatever you buy,” muses Vancouver industrial designer Adrian van Wijk, who has set up a company, Key 3D Rapid Prototyping, to market a three-dimensional printing service to local designers.

The applications for such a machine tickle the imagination. A sculptor could create artworks entirely on computer and never pick up a chisel. An angler could order a new fishing lure from an online catalogue and build it on his desktop, rather than waiting for delivery. Grandparents could literally e-mail a toy to a grandchild for Christmas.

Developed by Z Corp. of Burlington, Mass., this particular printer creates models one layer at a time. Each layer, just a 10th of a millimetre thick, starts as a coating of powder over an eight-by-10-inch surface. Using
technology very similar to an inkjet, the printer shoots a binding solution over areas to be built up according to 3D computer-aided design file. After several passes, it still does not look like much, but in time, surprisingly
durable forms of glued-together plaster emerge on the printing table.

on to develop such a “rapid prototyping” or “digital fabricating” device since the mid-1990s. At that time, a designer would have to spend thousands of dollars to get a human model builder to make a version of their design out of balsa wood or polyurethane foam to work out design flaws or show a client. It took days, even weeks, and still did not precisely match their three-dimensional CAD designs.

“Not having the machine you don’t go into 3D as soon as you should, and you make mistakes,” van Wijk says.
The first digital fabricators — or “fabbers” — used a subtractive process, whereby the machine carved models out of a block of material in the same way a carver fashions a totem pole out of a log. But the process wasted material and could only get at the model from the outside.

Using an additive process, 3-D printers can make much more complex objects. They can make a hollow ball, for example, or even place parts within parts, like the ball inside a baby’s rattle.

There are now several 3-D printers on the market. All of them work by slicing CAD files into layers and building the models layer by layer. Their differences lie in the materials they use and how they apply them. Some use stereolithography, whereby lasers burn resin in the pattern of each layer. Others use fuse deposition modelling, whereby a hot nozzle squeezes out molten plastic. A third process, selective laser sintering, uses lasers to melt powdered plastic into shape.

While Z Corp.’s machine cannot make models as large or smooth as some of its rivals, it is the fastest and cheapest 3-D printer on the market (about $35,000 US) and uses environmentally benign materials. It also
uses relatively simple technology adapted from a Hewlett Packard inkjet printer, meaning it could one day be mass produced and serviced when it breaks down.

Hewlett-Packard is reported to be developing a 3-D printer for the consumer market priced as low as $1,000 US. Contacted by The Vancouver Sun, HP Labs spokespeople would neither confirm nor deny the report.
Van Wijk doesn’t think it’s too far-fetched.

“If you look at, say, laser printers or photocopiers, at one stage they were very expensive machines and very few people could afford them,” he says.

Today combined printer-copier-fax machines can be had for as little as $200.

For now the main users of 3-D printers are industrial designers, engineers, architects, medical technicians and commercial artists. Key 3D has a Web site (www.key3d.com) where customers can e-mail their CAD
models and get an instant estimate of the cost of printing it.

Van Wijk recognized the need for such a service in Vancouver out of his own experience running JDI Design Inc., which mostly creates functional packages for pieces of new technology.

“We were sending a lot of our CAD models across the border to have people in the U.S. make them,” he says. It seldom took less than two days to get a real model back.

Having its own 3-D printer has already saved JDI time and money.Designing a battery-operated dog collar that lights up in the dark for a local engineering company, the firm turned conceptual drawings into a 3-
D CAD design, then grew the prototype on the printer. Having actual parts to work with, the two companies succeeded in cutting the number of mouldings to four from 14 — which meant that the “Amiglo” could be
manufactured cost-effectively in B.C. instead of in China.

“Often clients just need to see the shape in real life,” says JDI partner Greg Browne. A CAD model on a computer screen is a poor substitute. For example, JDI’s model of a hand-held pachymeter used to measure the thickness of an eye patient’s cornea helped Starfish Engineering, a Vancouver Island startup, firm up support from investors.

The printer also has uses in medicine, growing models of bones from which to cast stainless steel replacements.

“We can create the models from MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] scans,” van Wijk says.

So will desktop manufacturing become a part of our future?

“It’s a feasible fantasy,” he ventures.

mmccullough@png.canwest.com

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