“Well within our lifetime we will all have a 3-D printer in our homes, go online, download a plan, feed it to the printer and make a new part for something we have broken; the technology is advancing that fast,” Mr. Leonard said.
The former Technology and Engineering teacher demonstrated his company’s version of a desktop 3-D printer to a roomful of middle and high school TechEng teachers, showing them the possibilities of what they could accomplish in their classrooms.
“This is not a new concept; rapid prototyping, or the making of models or prototypes, has been around in industry since the 1980s. The news is that you can now have a personal or desktop-sized printer at an affordable price,” said Mr. Leonard, who now works for Technology Education Concepts Inc. of New Hampshire.
Footwear manufacturers use the technology to tweak their product, thickening the arches on a sneaker, changing the colors, designing a new look. When they are happy with the model, they then stop the manufacturing machines, retool, and start up again.
In “the medical world, pharmaceutical companies and orthopedics use the printers, too,” Mr. Leonard said.
He tells of a real-life orthopedics case, of a man with a severely abscessed tooth, which could have been a case of cancer or extensive orthopedic surgery.
“The man’s skull and jawbone was scanned, a model was made and before they did the surgery, they made two different orthopedic appliances to fit the section of the man’s jaw that was affected. That man spent less time in the operating room because of this technology,” Mr. Leonard said.
The history of the technology started in the 1990s in the United Kingdom, when Dr. Adrian Bower of Bath University proposed that machines should be able to build themselves.
The machine that Dr. Bower’s Rep Rap Project built was called Darwin and it made 60 percent of its own parts, according to Mr. Leonard.
The 3-D printer software is now available as an “open source,” a new concept of availability.
“It’s called ‘open sourcing,’ open for inspection and copying, no proprietary rights. It’s a geek thing. The geeks have come out of the woodwork and there are about 60 different people worldwide making these printers and about two-thirds of these people are making the software available as an ‘open source,’ ” Mr. Leonard said.
Charles Howard, a teacher at Quaboag Regional Middle and High School in Warren, already has a printer.
“I teach a CAD (computer-assisted design) class and we ask students to figure out engineering problems. They build machines on the computer, and the printer can make the parts of that machine so that they can see if it will work,” Mr. Howard said.
Mr. Leonard added that art teachers could use it to make 3-D models of illustrations and animation, and architecture students can use it to make models of buildings they have designed.
“We have teachers in Leominster who are using a 3-D printer in their Introduction to Design course and will be using it to create new components for their robotics designs,” Mr. Leonard said.