Prosthetic hand created using Solidoodle 3D printer

A father and son team named Peter Binkley and Peregrine Hawthorn have worked together to create a prosthetic hand for Hawthorn to use. The hand is called the Talon Hand 2.0 and was built on a Solidoodle 3D printer. We talked about the Solidoodle 3D printer when it launched back in 2012.

The design that the two used for the Talon Hand 2.0 wasn't entirely their own. It was based on work created by other users and then tweaked and scaled to be used by Hawthorn. The finished product is impressive considering that the two have only been using the printer for nine months.

The duo says that the reason they chose the Solidoodle was that it could print with multiple materials and you could access the settings of the printer. The first prosthetic hand that the two made on the printer was called the Snap-together Robohand hand they had to significantly modify the product to get it to function as desired.

For the finished product that the two created, they focused on making the hand stronger. Hawthorn used the hand heavily and was breaking parts frequently. The design was tweaked in software to better work right off the printer with less fiddling. The parts that are used in the hand were finished using a chemical vapor process to make them harder and to bond the layers together. Assembling a finished hand now takes about 6-8 hours of work.

SOURCE: solidoodle