Arman Aghbali

Paul Knox
JRN 303
17/4/13
3D Printers Can't Beat Star Trek
Laurie Mirsky needs to print an ornate medieval door lock that's about as wide
as his head.
He's the founder of 3D Phacktory, a 3D printer design studio in Toronto, and last
August he noticed that a new movie was filming in town, The Mortal Instruments:
City of Bones. Now Mirsky's been an assistant director on Toronto-based films and
TV shows far longer than he's been in the 3D printing business. He knew that
making props for those productions are a great source of revenue. So when he saw
that a movie based on the popular young adult book series will be filmed nearby, he
immediately called their prop department.
That netted him a meeting with Tony Ianni, the film's art director who he'd met
before on an assistant directing job. Soon Ianni visits 3D Phacktory's offices, looking
at the two Objet 3D printers in the building next door. One is an utter monolith - so
big it would be easy to mistake for a dark blue kitchen counter. The other is far
more innocuous. It sits on a table against the wall that divides the office from the
factory, looks like an oversized laser printer and can print detailed plastic models in
256 colours.
Ianni needs the big one. Mirsky agrees to build a four-part shell for one of their
props, an ancient padlock - plus a few swords. Each part of the lock will be about
the size of Mirsky's forearm and will slide over the machinery that actually locks the
door. Overall, the lock will be as big as a handbag. That evening Mirsky and his
team set the monolith to print a detailed grey model, ready to charge $5 per cubic
centimetre for spinning a smooth rubber-plastic hybrid.
And Mirsky needed the work. For that huge Objet 3D printer, the one that
attracts the majority of his customers, Mirsky paid $250,000. A quarter-million isn't
much for a great 3D printer, or one that will weave plastic at a high micron density
and create a model with premade interlocking parts. For real magic, prices go up
into the millions.
The 3D printing revolution is coming, but it's not as soon as one might think.
Good printers are expensive and designing 3D objects is a complex process where
every model must be tailored to the right machine. A hobby printer can be bought
for less than $2,000, but they're unreliable and require constant maintenance. Still,
there's no arguing that 3D printers are on the minds of industrial designers, or in
Mirsky's case, art directors.

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In this $1.6 billion industry, Canadian businesses are stepping in to meet the
demand for 3D printed parts. Javelin and Proto3000 are two of the biggest players in
Canada, while worldwide, the market is dominated by Stratasys and 3D Systems.
Meanwhile companies have sprung up offering high quality prints to the average
consumer, like Shapeways or Mirsky's new venture.
"These devices are highly complex pieces of technology that require expertise
to run. They are not the Starship Enterprise's replicator," says Matt Ratto, a
professor at the University of Toronto who studies 3D printers at his laboratory in
the Robarts Library. He adds, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot," mimicking Captain Jean-Luc
Picard's oft-requested beverage on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
3D printing has been around since the 1960s, though it was known as additive
manufacturing. Automotive companies and large-scale industrial design have been
using it for decades as a means of rapid prototyping. 3D printers allow companies to
quickly improve upon failed models of potential products. For instance, when a
company wants to sell a new iPhone case it needs a usable prototype. With a 3D
printer, designers could create several versions of the same case in rapid
succession until they make a version they like. Then they would create a sellable
model using traditional manufacturing techniques and ship that out to stores.
Until the last two decades, 3D printers were far too expensive to have on the
factory floor. But now that well-performing models sell for less than $100,000,
smaller companies involved in industrial design, film studios, even doctors and
dentists can afford them. Companies like Stratasys with its Dimension printer and
the Makerbot's Cupcake and Thing-O-Matic printers helped realize this shift.
Hobbyists latched on to the Cupcake and Thing-O-Matic since they were much
cheaper and could be easily modified. Although the smaller and cheaper machines
come with a price, they're not as reliable.
"The extruder head on this Makerbot (Thing-O-Matic)is only slightly bigger than
the extruder head on this Dimension," Ratto explains. The extruder head deposits
the thin strands of melted plastic onto the platform over and over again in layers
until it's built the final product, like a spider building a three-dimensional web. The
smaller the head, the more detailed the work can be. Cheaper printers tend to have
bigger heads, and the individual layers will feel rougher, each with its own ridge. A
lower quality model will feel like sandpaper compared to the smoothness of a high
quality model. "The calibration of keeping things square and keeping things
accurate and all that stuff is what separates a $50,000 machine from a $1,500
machine," Ratto says.
Mirsky doesn't have that problem. He paid Proto3000, a Toronto-based 3D
printer distributor, for a mid-range Objet; higher end Objets can cost as much as
$600,000. But no matter the machine, he still can't push a button and demand "Tea.
Earl Grey. Hot." First he'd need to check the design in Solid Works, a CAD-based 3D
drawing program. Once that's been confirmed, he'd send it to the Objet. The
printing process takes about 12 hours for larger objects, so 3D Phacktory leaves its

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printers on overnight. The Objet hums and buzzes all alone, adding layers of plastic
bit by bit. Mirksy goes to work about six days a week and most days the printer has
something ready for him in the morning.
"The real surprise is always seeing the final objects in person," he says.
Each part of Ianni's lock comes out covered in a thin layer of wax-like material.
That's good news. A failed model would have layers of plastic loosely hanging from
its edges, like thread on an unraveled fabric. To remove the wax, these models need
to be power-washed. The power-washer sits at the back of the bedroom-sized
factory, and at first glance looks like a television with two holes underneath the
screen, so anyone can reach inside. Once the parts are scrubbed, they're dumped in
lye for a couple of hours to dissolve any residue.
Few people know how an Objet works, or how to deal with the finished product,
which is why selling them can be a challenge. Doug Angus-Lee faces that issue
every day. He's a rapid prototype product manager at Javelin Technologies, a
distributor of 3D printers. Headquartered in Vaughan, Angus-Lee and his coworkers
sell Stratasys's Objet printers in Canada and deal with a mountain of inquiries every
day. On a day in March, Angus-Lee began sending emails to potential clients at 8
a.m.. By the time he arrived in the office at 10:30 a.m., he'd dealt with three
different proposals. Often he has a bigger problem than the sales crunch. Angus-Lee
is a manager of expectations.
"A lot of people, they hear about rapid prototyping and they come in here and
they think they can get a fairly simple part made with not a lot of detail or very
brittle parts," Angus-Lee says.
"But then you also have another segment of people who come in and think that
for a couple thousand dollars they'll get a printer that can make metal parts that
they can use in their car. And that's just not realistic either."
As a result, a big part of Angus-Lee's job is client education. He shows clients
samples. He describes what past clients have done. He gives them examples of how
this magical machine can change the way they do business. And it only costs
upwards of $10,000.
Mirsky spends almost as much time teaching clients as Angus-Lee does. Every
day he gets between five and 10 inquiries, half of which are questions about 3D
printing. Then there's all the tours he gives of their facilities and the meetings he
has with clients. 3D printing may be in the zeitgeist but many people still don't
understand the technology.
Meanwhile at the Phacktory, Derek Quinneville is responsible for taking the
prints out of the lye. He makes sure to put on a pair of gloves and goggles before
reaching into the plastic tub underneath the power-washer. Lye's corrosive after all.
He takes the prints and washes them one more time, withstanding the powerwasher's constant foghorn drone. Once clean, he spreads them around on a metal

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pan. Quinneville wasn't around for The Mortal Instruments print - Mirsky hired him
back in January - but the process is the same. He sets the metal pan on a tall rack,
and waits for them to dry. Then he returns to the printers and prepares them for
whichever design comes next.
Quinneville does more for 3D printing than help with the printers. He's a
community manager at the Site3 CoLaboratory, just south of Ossington Station,
where people gather to build new projects, often using 3D printers. On the last
Monday night in February, about 15 people gathered around a table on the second
floor of the Site3 workshop for Quinneville's monthly 3D printing showcase. The
table was covered in his personal collection of prints and a few other parts: a goldpainted Alexander the Great mask, a litany of feeble plastic combs, a statue of an
ancient Indian god spray-painted to look like stone. Many of them came from
Quinneville's Makerbot Cupcake, a tiny hobbyist model he keeps in his apartment.
The crowd marvelled at the different parts as Quinneville explained the basics to
them. He talked about printing the mask with his Cupcake, dividing the print into
multiple parts that he could later glue together. He introduced them to Thingiverse,
an online repository containing thousands of 3D printer designs that can be
uploaded to any Makerbot printer.
Kym Watts runs up the stairs in the middle of the demonstration. He heaves his
own hobby printer, a modified Ultimaker, onto a creaky table near the stairs. Watts
works in 3D animation and originally intended to use his Ultimaker to print character
models.
The table settles and he starts printing his younger brothers' gifts. Watts is
heading home to Australia in two weeks and plans to surprise them with a gear box:
a plastic box where the corners all turn around on a hinge, attached together with
gears. He says he hopes it'll inspire them to buy 3D printers of their own. Three
regulars soon gather around his printer as it creates each part. One of them
mentions that his machine beeps like R2D2 from Star Wars. He puts his ear near the
extruder head, dashing back and forth, and listens to the robotic whistle.
The Ultimaker marked Watts as a bit of an outsider. Most hobbyists use
American models. He imported his $1,600 printer from the Netherlands. It's about
as capable as some of the more powerful printers on display, although far noisier. Its
sepia brown case shakes at an unnerving pace. Watts had to slowly modify it over
three months before it printed at a consistent quality. It arrived with a defect.
Fixing the defect made him replace parts. Those parts broke. Now the case is
surrounded by bright green 3D printed handles, knobs and gears, and he's still
worried about leaving it on overnight. To say the least, Watts had a hard time with
the trial and error required to make a hobbyist printer work.
"It's because I don't have the engineering side that I know a lot the people who
are into this already have," Watts said. His story was common. Every 3D printer at
the meeting had a few parts in a bright crayon colour. Watts doesn't think the

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Ultimaker, or any hobbyist printer, is ready for mass consumption. For now, it's cool
enough that he thinks his brothers should have one.
While it's unlikely that 3D printers will ever be able to produce any object out of
thin air, they are improving all the time. Makerbot upgraded its line to include the
Replicator 2 and the Replicator 2X, which are far more reliable than their Cupcake
and Thing-O-Matic counterparts. New printers can print metal, wood and
occasionally human cells, although each is an infant technology, fundamentally
different from 3D printers that deal in plastic. Their price tags are in the millions.
The biggest problems today are not technical problems. They're infrastructure
problems. One day, it might be worth it to have a 3D printer at home, though Ratto,
through all his research at U of T, thinks it is far more likely that 3D printers will first
show up at a print shop.
"Something like a Kinko's, yeah. And we have that now. We have 3D printing
services now some of which are available online like Pinoko or Shapeways, where
you upload your model and they send it to you in the mail," Ratto says. "It's really
set up for design professional services."
Until then, places like Anubis 3D can print for industrial designers in massive
volume. Big manufacturers can buy their own 3D printers from companies like
Javelin. And the hobbyist printers aren't going away. Watts went to Australia and his
brothers loved the gear box, mindlessly spinning each corner to shift the box's
shape.
As for 3D Phacktory, business is going well for them. The four-part medieval lock
went to The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones prop department, where artists
painted it, fitted it and used it in the movie. Mirsky can't say the context but
promises he'll post a screenshot on his website once the movie's in theatres August
23. In the nine months since then, he's sold miniature tires for a model electric car
and worked with industrial design firms to produce prototype iPhone cases, among
other small models - one of which launched at the Consumer Electronics Show this
year.
"The thing about 3D printing is that it's a new form of expression. So you don't
really know what's going to come through the door until somebody has an idea and
they want to realize it," Mirsky says.
So long as that idea isn't "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."