Revenge of the 3D scanning nerds
Move over Brad Pitt. Have a seat Mr.Fabio. All you alpha male muscle men, stand down! The nerd nation is on the rise. I’m not just talking about in your bad breath face geeky glasses and some braces. I am talking about a well-educated, technically inclined DIY nerdism that just might make you drop your books and slam into a locker. So instead of popping your buns with a locker room towel, let me just go straight to the nose pick. There is a guy who not only got braces, be he actually made the braces himself. Wow. Something tells me that his face will be on Magnet Mouth Magazine. Using 3D printing and 3D scanning services he made his own zipper lips.
A Smart 3D Scanning Cookie
All jokes aside now. This guy is a smart cookie. He was a poor college student trying to make ends meet. Tuition bills, living costs, and every other expense left him without a dime for dental care. Braces are not cheap!. One can spend thousands of dollars just to get those pearly whites to stand at attention. The problem was that his parents had already spent that money when he was younger but I guess he didn’t follow direction very well. The end result was a smile to make you frown. He was not too happy about that. So what did he do? So he took a ton of courage and a bit of research, threw it in the wok and fried up his own braces. Amazing! DIY braces. That is the first time I have ever heard of such a thing.
How in the world did he do that with 3D scanning?
So the thing that most people want to know is how did he do it? Not that most people are going to be eager to do that themselves. They are curios to know what he did. First of all, he had access to so pretty good 3D printing and 3D scanning services equipment at the university. He probably couldn’t have done it with that. The first thing he did was figure out what his teeth looked like. He made a mold of his teeth so that he knew how they needed to be adjusted. After that he used 3D scanning to digitize the position of his teeth. The digital model allowed him to analyze the position of each tooth that needs to move and the path to which it would move. He then used some special plastic used by dentists to create aligners which had made by first fitting them to the 3D printed models.
It seems that his efforts to correct his own smile using 3D printing and 3D scanning services was a success. All it took was a little desperation and some determination to get the job done. We should be careful though not to think that everyone can do this. Trying to DIY your own healthcare could go bad just as easily. If you are not a professional you might do something that could harm you. You might end up sticking some poisonous material in your mouth and then have to go to the hospital anyway.
