Thirty years before Westworld’s present timeline, 3D printing still inhabits a somewhat boring reality. In Silicon Valley, top executives at 3D printing startup Carbon deployed its in-house team of designers and strategized with a medical manufacturing company in Minnesota, an assistant professor of pathology at Harvard, and laboratory and nursing staff at Stanford to create a new, printable swab and fill the gap. Still, for a long time, 3D printing wasn’t on his radar. Speed is a major advantage CLIP has over 3D printing as we’ve previously known it, but it’s not the only one. The final objects have striations where they’re structurally weak, which is why 3D printing is okay for prototyping but not creating final products. These were allayed through the hand-in-hand development process Carbon employs when partnering with a new brand; getting a component onto Osprey’s most innovative pack to date is equally important to Carbon, particularly given that most of the products it produces are unseen – electrical connectors or components inside medical devices – and especially after three decades of forecasters proselytizing 3D printing as the future of manufacturing without it actually happening. Carbon isn’t just concerned with making 3D printing faster, it wants to make better stuff.
Read the full article at Gear Patrol
