1/21/19 Boy Is Becoming A 3D Business Entrepreneur?

    I don't hang out with Boy much, and I hardly see him during the week.  He is still on winter break from school, but he has been working every day at what was his intern place.  He is no longer considered an intern, I guess they are keeping him and they have made him a "technician" now.  He didn't like the change in title, but like me and his GF said "it means they are keeping you and you don't have to worry about whether they are bringing you back for another internship, you are basically an employee.  He is still an hourly, but he is about two semesters away from that changing, hopefully.
    The other new thing on Boy's radar is his love of these 3D printers.  He got this big one a couple months ago, I mean he is still figuring out how it works, and suddenly I see another similar box shaped thing which I can tell is another printer but different.  He explained that the bigger one has a line feed of material that can be from plastic to even some kinds of metal and the machine builds a 3D creation by moving a tip and depositing a tiny layer on top of the previous layer which results in eventual creations of any multitude of things.  He has been working on a skull replica of the helmet that Cubone wore on the Pokémon cartoons.  Because of its size, it was broken down into 6 pieces and each piece can take up to 40-50 hours to make.  The beauty is that you just feed it the instructions from a computer and it goes on its own.  As long as it has a spool of material it continues humming along.  I am writing in the kitchen right now at 6:00am and can hear the humming of the printer going on right now.  The newer smaller printer works differently.  The set-up has a small bath for a liquid material and then a laser comes and makes a print from the bottom up.  He did a smaller version of the Cubone skull and it was maybe 3-4 inches long, the printer made it into ~1,500 layers and built it from the ground up.
    The differences are that the spool one can make much larger structures, but they are built with a honeycomb structure inside, to reduce waste of materials.  The other tool with the laser makes a solid unit, and can produce a lot more detail, but it is limited to smaller things and the solution costs twice as much as a spool to make the given same amount or something.
    Boy and his friend who already works in a lab that does this for a living are trying to get something going.  A friend wanted the Cubone skull as a hat, but they gave her the cost of $180 for materials and time on the printer and she thought it a bit much.  They are building it anyway to figure out the ins and outs of their new toys.  I like that the friend knows about them enough that they are taking them apart and ordering new tips and whatever to make them run.  Hopefully, they can get something going.  I told them, they can have one of the guest rooms to set up their equipment, I was even joking that we are going to need a chemistry hood soon if they keep going.  The friend said yeah, then I can see the cops showing up thinking we have a meth lab going, when it is just a bunch of nerd stuff.

Large Cubone skull similar to spooled 3D printer.

Small Cubone skull from laser printer.