Colin_6
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Photo credit ARYN TOOMBS / CALGARY HERALD
What started out as a project between a handful of students in Edmonton, and Print Your Mind here in Calgary, has grown into a truly international effort. The humanitarian and educational roots of this project have sparked the interest of many across the province. Thanks to a very successful crowdfunding campaign, we were able to raise $3500 in just 28 days to put on a live event where we will 3D print, assemble and donate 30 3D printed prosthetic e-NABLE hands to children in need around the world. The event will be taking place on March 11 at Calgary Board of Education’s Career & Technologies Centre. We expect to welcome 50+ students from Edmonton and Calgary to take part in this globally spirited event. Stay tuned for further announcements regarding the event coming soon.
We are now joining forces with many new students, teachers, school boards, parents and businesses to extend the reach of the benefits that will come from the project. We are excited to be working with the Calgary Board of Education along with Edmonton Public Schools, the University of Lethbridge, Roots 2 Stem and other organizations who will be helping us bring this project to life.
There are currently 15+ students in both Edmonton and Calgary who are gaining high school credits specifically for 3D printing prosthetic hands for this e-NABLE hand project through the Innovate program. These 3D printed prosthetic hands will be donated to the e-NABLE foundation where they will be distributed around the world to children who would otherwise not have access to them. Not only have people wanting to help reached out to us, but also those with sons or daughters in need of hands right here in Alberta. We are very excited to say that we will be matching at least two students taking part in the project with recipients within Alberta.
We also wanted to share a story with you that was very special to us. We recently met with McKenzie and Clara (pictured below). Mckenzie is a high school student taking part in the project. She will be creating a custom hand just for Clara, a 4 year old Calgarian born with deformity in her left hand. We met with the two of them to take measurements so we can begin building a new hand for Clara. Clara told us that sometimes her friends in dance class aren’t sure if they should hold her effected limb while doing group activities. She wants a purple “robot-hand”, as she calls it, so she can hold hands with her fellow classmates and feel like she is the same as the other students. We will be working with McKenzie over the next month to make sure she can do just that.
We are so thankful to every one of our friends, family, community members and people around the world who contributed to helping us bring this project to life. Without your support we would not be able to undertake this truly inspiring initiative. Real change will come from this, both here in Alberta, and around the world. If you would like more information on how to get involved, please contact us at support@printyourmind3d.ca or give us a call at 587-226-2645.
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Nikki
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Great to see you getting involved with eNable @Colin_6! I’m sure the other Calgary Hubs would love to find out about it at your next meetup and perhaps you can get some tips from @CharlotteJ on hosting an eNable print-a-thon?
Our e-nable guru is a Hub as well: @martinv77
We had a crazy marathon last december when we tried to print and assemble as many raptor hands as possible within 24 hrs. These were all shipped to the Moore foundation to be used as show models.
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Colin_6
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Thanks @Nikki! I am certainly working hard to spread the word to get more of the Calgary Hubs involved. I’ve been in contact with the folks at e-NABLE a few times to get tips and advice on running a hand-a-thon. I can use all the help I can get so please let me know if you have advice @CharlotteJ.
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Thanks for the mention @CharlotteJ for those interested to learn more, I’m always willing to assist. PS these are the hands we sent 40 total…
Colin_6
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That’s awesome @martinv77! How did you determine what sizes to print? How many left vs right hands did you make? Did you print these all in PLA?
Hi Collin, since the hands will be used for demonstration proposes we printed them at 100%. We did print 25 right handers and 15 lefties… We used a variety of materials provided to us by our sponsors #ColorFabb and #Ultimaker. Most were PLA, but we also used XT and the all new nGEN
Good to see you’ve joined the conversation @martinv77 
@Colin_6 as you may notice, Martin can tell you everything about the ‘technical part’. He is pretty actively involved in the e-nable community. I’m the mayor from the Breda community and met Martin through a 3DHubs meetup. Last year May I asked Martin to give a presentation about e-nable. The idea rised to organize an e-nable event, but by the end of the year we still had not organized anything… So, coincidentally, by it end of the year it turned out that our agenda’s were pretty full and that the best option was to organize a marathon starting at 6pm friday and end 6pm at saturday…
Martin contacted e-nable to find out how we could help considering a big capacity. It turned out that a the Moore foundation was requesting 100 demonstration models. Looking back at the event: this made it really ‘easy’. We could print an enormous amount of parts and make crazy color combinations, since all the sizes were the same. So when we had the date set, we started to organize a big party! We knew of some people that they were really interested, so we asked them to join for the 24 hrs. Beside that we asked every printer owner we knew to lend us their printer. Resulting in 50 printers!!! (Mostly Ultimakers). By then we started to realize it was getting big and it was easy to find some sponsors. Martin contacted Colorfabb (also because they had some promotional pictures of the raptor hand printed with their material). They sponsored filament (so did Plastic2Print).
Finally we had everything sponsored: printers (Ultimaker lend us their towers with 12 small UM2go’s), filament, hardware (everything you need to finish a hand: elastics, wires, screws, etc), food (diner, lunch, breakfast, midnight snacks, beer and party snacks). Our neighbours offered music (it’s a vinyl store) and the other neighbour offered us to use their office for relaxing).
So we were with ~8 people working the whole night (we had some nightly visitors, but the kernel was 8 people). At saturday we made it a public event starting at 2pm for everybody willing to help. From 4-6pm people who were interested were welcome to come and watch.
We were overwhelmed by the interest of the audience (and media) and were really flattered by the number of people passing by to come and help assembling hands! Check out our facebook timeline (end of december) for pictures, movies, etc.
Concluding:
- a lot of fun and crazyness
- good to print the same hands and have no ‘patients’ involved (this absolutely depends on the way you organize your event! we aimed at as many hands as possible with no people who need a hand involved, so we could focus on production)
- a lot of struggling with the printers… (it’s adviseble to print the parts seperately in stead of the file with all the parts on one platform, when your printers crashes, a lot of work is gone…)
- by printing the same hands, we could really learn people easily how to assemble and do production work
Cons
- we achieved a relatively low platform involvement: people participating did not need to sign up on e-nable platform
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@martinv77 can you help with more cons…
Next time:
- we will focus more on people owning a printer and learning them how to assemble a hand. everybody with a printer has printed a raptor, but didn’t assemle it to a working hand. it’s easy to print one and assemble it. but once people need to go to the hardware store and find out what they need more to finish it decently, they give up…)
- i want to stimulate participants more to participate actively in the e-nable community
If you have any questions, just let us know!
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Well, there aint a lot I can add @CharlotteJ 
@Colin_6 One thing to consider is the aftercare. If you have 8 people dedicated to printing an assembling the hands, Quality control is easy. However, if you get swamped (like we did) with helping hands during the event aftermath, you will get a few hands here and there that won’t necessarily meet the standards. As a result we’ve spent another 2 nights of correcting mishaps and finishing all hands. Reducing our total volume from 50 to 40 finished hands.
Another thing to mention is shipping. If you stay local this is not a big deal, but you should consider the cost of shipping and potential paperwork for customs to ship abroad. We had our shipping lane secured through Amgen Inc. (company I work for) but it is worth exploring your options with companies that are used to shipping as it ain’t a regular postage deal :D. You should avoid using the terms “medical, device, prosthetic” on your shipping documents. As it may trigger unwanted delays in the shipment as there are specific requirements for shipping these type of goods (which you are not likely to meet). Just call them what they are “3D printed hands”. It is worth considering the value too (i assigned a customs value of $10,-- for each hand e.g. $400,-- for the total shipment). For customs purposes you need to declare a value (even if it is a donation) to avoid additional fees, make clear with a separate statement that your shipment is a donation for charity and will not be sold.
That’s a bout it.
And to echo Charlotte’s comment, let us know if you need to know more…
