he reinvented the 3D printer

One of the biggest challenges with 3D printing that will lead to the ultimate unlock is being able to print with any color or material in one shot, Being able to use the same printer, to be able to print on any layer with multiple properties, rigidness, flexibility, toughness, and even conductivity.

It's the one thing preventing us from having something like the replicator from Star Trek, to be able to print anything from the circuit board on your phone to the nerve endings on your finger.

That's what I'm trying to build. And I'm starting with teeth.

So about a year ago, I was working at an Industrial Resin 3D Printing Company. I was on the hardware team there, and I was helping with designing these large industrial printers.

But I had been passionate about 3D printing for years, even before working there, constantly tinkering with different resin printers that I would make in my apartment specifically to be able to make figurines like for different board games like Warhammer.

If there are other companies working on multi material resin 3D printer, I think that's. I would have just tried to work there.

I had to make this myself because no one else was making it. So this is one of the polyone printers. It's a multi material resin 3D printer.

You have bowls, they're called vats, that hold a liquid resin that turns into a plastic or rubber or silicone when UV light hits it.

So unlike filament 3D printers, which will melt a plastic into a liquid and then deposit it, this is actually synthesizing these plastics inside the machines.

At the bottom of each of these vats is this taut film that's clear and kind of flexible. So the build plate here, this is where the part actually like grows from.

During the printing process, you're essentially drawing your image on the bottom of this film. So layer by layer, you can build up that 3D shape.

That's like the same way that almost every resin printer works. But with this setup, we actually have multiple of these vats.

We can move from vat to vat, but then that leads to one which is uncured resin. So if you've ever used a resin printer, you would know that after a print is done, you have to wash off the part.

And so if you were to just have that set up where you're moving from vat to vat over time, you'd just be mixing all of your different resins in each vat with each other.

So if you want to print a part with multiple colors or materials in it, you have to clean off or get rid of all of that uncured resin before you switch materials.

And so this was my solution to it. So the build plate itself will actually begin spinning

very fast and all of that uncured resin will fling off of it back into the reservoir and off of the part.

But the big problem with that is actually returning it to the original angle that it was at within 25 microns, a quarter of the width of a human hair, because otherwise the print would lose all of its detail.

Yeah, so this was one of the early prototypes for the, the locating mechanism. The servo here can actually move this mechanism up and the shaft coupling can move freely and then it can spin and sp.

Spin and then stop at a random location. Servo arm drops and then the shaft coupling can spin and then fit into that V groove similar to something called a, it's a kinematic coupling.

So what does this all mean? Like what can you use this for? Let's walk through like some of the applications or like things you can make with these machines.

This is a, it's a gummy bear that's printed with a ceramic filled resin and can actually scratch soft metals like aluminum.

You could print in like silicone materials, a material that can stretch, stretch and then come back to normal things like gaskets.

Some people use it for pneumatic robotic devices that change shapes depending on pressure you put into it.

There is one use case that I recently

started working on, which is this right here, which I'm really excited about. Why I'm so excited about this is because it uses a new type of resin we've been working on, which is actually a conductive resin.

There are no conductive resins that actually exist on the market. There are things that are ESD or like slightly conductive, but like mega ohm resistivity ratings where you couldn't actually put any sort of useful power through it.

So this is the conductive resin I developed and I'm not going to tell you the recipe right now, but it's what I use to make this.

So this is an early iteration of a PCB that was entirely printed on my machine. Both the non conductive parts and the conductive parts in one print.

So right now this is not like a functional pcb. It has conductive parts of it and non conductive parts and there's a wire solder to it.

But it doesn't actually do anything functional. But you can imagine in the future using the same sort of process for making multi layer PCBs.

And right now even from, you know, the cheapest manufacturers overseas getting a 10 plus layer PCB is still 100 plus dollars whereas a single layer PCB is like a buck.

If we can make your 10 layer PCB in a machine for a linear cost scale like 20 or $30, that's way cheaper than even the cheapest overseas manufacturers for multi layer PCBs.

So one day maybe you'll to print something like an iPhone and for really cheap. So why teeth? Yeah, so a couple reasons.

One of the main reasons is it actually represents a really high benchmark for my machine to hit. You need really precise geometry and you have these different shades of teeth and gums all together.

If it can make dentures or crowns or bridges that are good enough in the dental lab's eyes to put into patients mouths, then that means I've done my job right.

And resin printing has already been used in the dental industry for a really long time. I'm partnering with a few dental resin manufacturers so dental labs can actually use these.

Thanks for stopping by. That was my machine and I'm going to get back to printing.

Hello.