3D Printing Community To Print Many Hands

By on August 18th, 2015 in blog

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e-NABLE has launched a new project to produce as many 3D printed hand kits for amputees as possible during the next month. 
  
e-NABLE is one of the organizations that first realized the incredible value of 3D printed hand kits for children. While it is possible for parents to acquire ā€œtraditionalā€ hand kits that restore some ability for amputees, they quickly became obsolete as the child grows: their size changes. This results in a requirement for great expense to keep up a stream of ever-growing hand kits. 

Enter 3D printing, where such objects can be easily 3D printed – and easily resized as the child grows. Their tagline: 

e-NABLE: A Global Network of Passionate Volunteers Using 3D Printing To Give The World A ā€œHelping Handā€. 

Ultimaker has provided an example of e-NABLEā€™s results, showing the work done by one of their customers to produce a replacement hand for Luke Dennison (a.k.a. Cool Hand Luke, shown above):

Eight year old Luke was born without the use of his left hand, so his father Gregg took it upon himself to find a solution to help his son. Gregg connected with e-NABLE, and now uses an Ultimaker 2 3D printer to create a number of different functional hands for Luke so he can hold and pick up objects.

Now theyā€™ve challenged the 3D printing community to crowdprint as many as 1,000 hand kits in the next few months. It is definitely a good cause and if you have an idle 3D printer and some spare filament, why not participate? 

The venture received a boost from 3DPrinterOS, who have made it even easier to participate. The cloud-based 3D printer network has pre-loaded the 3D files for the hand kit into their base software, meaning anyone who installs 3DPrinterOS is ready to print a hand kit immediately. We see the left and right 3D models pre-sliced by 3DPrinterOS for instant printing on Replicators, Ultimakers, Felixes, Printrbots, LulzBots, Duplicators and more. 

Theyā€™ve even added some motivation by providing free T-shirts to the first 30 hand kit prints on their network, as well as a grand prize of a Raspberry Pi 2 to whoever prints the most hand kits by September 15th. 

Via Enabling The Future, Ultimaker and 3DPrinterOS

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!