The one gentleman is afraid the skulls he uses and collects for use in his artwork will be increasing difficult to get with new reforms....
I stumbled across this.... "let's scan and print our own skulls?!"
Open3dp is a website hosted by the Solheim Rapid Prototyping Laboratory in the Mechanical Engineering Department on the University of Washington campus.
"While teaching our Advanced RP/RM (rapid prototyping/rapid manufacturing) course, I was discussing the course requirements. One our of requirements is an independent research project and report to be undertaken in teams of two (the project is worth 40% of your grade). As an instructor, I would ask the class at every meeting if they had any ideas for a project.
One of the teams (composed of Juliana Meira do Valle and Michael Storey) approached me after class, “We would like to print in bone as our project!” Juliana is a DXArts/Art major and Michael is a Mechanical Engineering major."
“We’d like to print in bone!”
“What?” “Why?”
“I want to print bones or animals that never existed!” “Do you think it’s possible?”
“Sure, OK!”
“How do we get started?”
“We’ll need to find the material in the correct powder size and then you will start bench testing it”
It took a couple of days of internet searching to find a supplier of powdered bone and then came the interesting questions.
“Where did the bone come from?”
“Wow, it’s food grade.” “Why would you eat it?”
After we located a good source of powdered bone meal (start with your local health food or vitamin store), they started bench testing the bone with an array of adhesive powder and various binder solutions. This process took place across a five week period. Each week a different set of adhesive ratios was tested against our existing binders. Success!!!
uliana’s work which was displayed at the Fresno, CA show organized by Laura West proves that 3DP in Bone is possible with amazing results.
