Thinking outside the box: How this man gives 3D printing a personal touch

I wasn’t too creative growing up. I mean, I would try to draw and I would try to do these these artsy things, but I just, I never felt like it came to me naturally. But when I found that digital 3D modeling, it was almost like that was my way of being creative. We’re at the Memorial University School of Medicine, and they have a 3D printing facility here called the Lab. Now I heard they make some cool stuff here, so I asked if I could come and do a story. But every person I asked told me that the real story at the lab is the young guy who runs the place. Hi, I’m Thomas Osmond, and I’m the 3D printing technician here at Monument 3D. And we’re here to support the students, staff, faculty, But we also do work externally. You know, anybody can come to us and say all we want this printed, or we want a bit of design work and we could do that for him. You say we can’t. You mean you can’t, right? Yeah, it’s just, it’s just me here. But I don’t want to take all the credit. You know Thomas, the 3D printing lab, you can’t download these models, right? Whenever you give him an idea of what you want, he comes back multiple times to make sure that he’s doing exactly what you asked. 3D printing is not my area of expertise by any means. And I came with a problem and I explained the situation to him and I showed him what we need. And he was like, Oh yeah, we could do that. And it wasn’t. I was so happy. Right now I’m just changing the filament on this 3D printer. The filament is basically a plastic, and the plastic is melted inside the tool head or the nozzle and it’s redeposited on the build plate here. So what will happen is it’ll build up the model layer by layer. It’ll layer one layer of plastic, maybe 1/4 of a millimeter thick. It’ll cool and then it’ll do the next layer. I probably feel that creative jolt somewhere between designing the model, creating the model and having in my hands, how does a person be creative at something? I think most people think of as mainly computer driven and machine driven. Well, somebody’s got to tell the computer what to do. The very first thing you want to do is get a digital 3D model file. You can really make whatever you can imagine. So if I wanted to make a trachea model or an elbow model or a knee or a heart. Now some of those geometries can be a little complex, but that’s nothing that these softwares can’t handle for the most part. I’ll find pre-existing STLS, but when you have a specific application, a unique application, that’s when the human kind of comes into it. So if I had individual with a unique anatomy and they have a bulge discs or cracked vertebrae, there’s probably not a 3D model already made for that one in a million circumstance. That’s where I come in. I would take the pre-existing models or make it myself and try to put something in the hands of the client that they’re really just imagining. Thomas has made us a variety of different things. One of these things is a skin test trainer, which is this right here. This is actually a simulation for suturing. Before this it was all done with pigskin. If you’ve ever used a pig’s foot for suturing, you know that it’s not fun. So Thomas designed the mold and then this mold is 3D printed and then it’s poured in multi layers. So it simulates the multiple layers of your skin and they can use it repeatedly. So once you suture on this material, it’s a silicone material, you can take the suture out and do it again and again. He made this little piece, which is a lot more. So this goes in a much larger device. We needed this to be extremely precise and that was the issue. This little bump or spacer over here, I don’t know if you can see it needed to be exactly 300 microns. Know where we went Was able to do that for us. If this is not as precise and as delicate as it could possibly be, the tests are wrong. You just won’t be able to calibrate the technology the right way. For a moment I thought we were going to have to ship it off somewhere else. So I came and I bothered Thomas and he fixed it on his end straight away and just gave me the final piece it would and it didn’t take long at all. It was incredible set its toe casualty so easily too. It’s just yes, we can help you with that. I study the cardiovascular system but specifically the microcirculation and so the microcirculation are the tiniest blood vessels in the human body at this scale. We can see individual red blood cells as they flow through the capillaries. This is a custom designed device, not one off but unique devices that are being fabricated for you know very specialized research questions. So the only way that we’re able to, you know rapidly prototype and and use devices like this is this direct relationship with Thomas and Mind Med 3D that allows us to modify our designs and test those designs within days. As opposed to you know, it really wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have 3D printing resources and Thomas’s expertise within the faculty, medicine. What I might bring different than other people, I’d like to say communication. There’s probably not as much engineering as you might think in this kind of work. It’s more art and design and kind of being a bit creative and trying to think outside the box. I don’t mind talking to people either, you know, and and really trying to pick their brain to see what they might want from their model of all the things you could do with an engineering degree. Did you picture this? Yeah. I mean, this is probably one of the coolest jobs you could get.