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
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
@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…
@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…
