3-D Printing Gets Ahead: How Does a Printer Make a Fossil?
3-D printers can create models and prototypes, replicas of your head, even living tissues—and at Lehman College, they reproduce and reconstruct ancient fossils
3-D Printing Gets Ahead: How Does a Printer Make a Fossil?
- CLEANING UP: When a fossil model emerges from the lab printer, the product is covered with a yellowish, semitransparent support material that will crumble off under the pressure of a water jet. To prevent the jet from soaking the rest of the lab, the model is placed in this box, held steady by human hands inserted into the rubber gloves seen protruding through the front... Sophie Bushwick
- BELLY OF THE BEAST: The wire-covered printhead at left moves back and forth over the printer tray at center, depositing resin layer by layer to build up a replica of the digital bone. After the printing is completed here at the lab, a completed physical copy will be sitting on the central tray, matching its digital twin on the computer screen... Sophie Bushwick
- 3D VIRTUAL AND SOLID VISUALIZATION LAB: Lehman College graduate student Claudia Astorino operates the Objet Eden260 3-D printer [ right ]. The cartridges of printing resin (a material that will harden into a rigid blue plastic-like material) and support material, which together form the basis of the printed products, sit on the table behind the printer, and the beige box at left houses a water jet used to clean support material off products when they first emerge from the printer... Sophie Bushwick
