Shoes Made by Science!

In the continued spirit of the Science Festival, I thought I’d share one of the more interesting ways to make a shoe.  Hand-stitched?  Fine.  Faux fur?  Awesome.  But… printed?  3D printing has been showing up on runways a lot lately—jewelry, clothes, and shoes, of course.  Take a look at these:

By Janina Alleyne.

Or these!

By Continuum. 

Both printed.  So what’s the deal with this 3D printing?  Deputy Shoe Fairy Kristen and I headed down to NextFab on Washington Avenue last month to find out.  What’s NextFab?  A super-cool place where you can take classes and use all kinds of wood- and metal-working tools, or industrial sewing machines, or fancy computer programs, and—you guessed it!—3D printers.  Brandon, the manager of laser process, 3D imaging, and 3D printing at NextFab (and Philly’s resident 3D printing expert) showed us around.

They have four different printers in the lab.  Here are two!

The ones on either end.  The one on the right is from 1985!  I didn’t know 3D printing technology went back that far.  All four printers work differently, from the types of building materials used (powders, nylons, coils of plastics…) to the different ways the materials are set (lasers, UV light…) to the ways the printed-out negative space is emptied (dusting it out with brushes, melting out the wax…).  The size of the layers is different (from hundredths of an inch to ten-thousandths of an inch), and the time it takes to print something is different because of that, but just about anything can be printed.

(That rectangular thing on the back right?  That’s a model of the new Barnes building with the stress points of the architecture in red.  Very cool.)  You can even get a 3D printer for your home!  It might look a little something like this:

Those coils are plastics that are fed into the machine.  Some are biodegradable, even!  The things it prints can be awesomely crushable:

    

So maybe not good for shoes.  Brandon says he might use the nylon-printing machine for a pair of shoes, but he’d more likely send out the job to yet another type of printer.  Need a plan for them to use?  Cubify has a bunch.  Just download your plan of choice and send it to your printer.  They have a couple of free plans too…how about the Facet shoes?

And I’m digging the orange, but you could print it in whatever color.  So happy science festival, everyone!

Many thanks to Deputy Shoe Fairy Kristen for taking me to NextFab, and for being my photographer extraordinaire!  Thanks also to Brandon for teaching us all about 3D printing.  Seriously, look at the charts he drew us: