January 24, 2007 News & Views » Cover

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Pimp my arm 

Tackle Design is innovating the world of prosthetics -- and sharing the love

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Luckily, the manufacturing hurdles that have made the Trautman hook -- and prosthetics in general -- so costly and impractical to produce are slowly going away. Many miles (and about a century) from the wood carving tools of Heide's workshop is FineLine Prototyping near Brier Creek in Raleigh. FineLine, and its offshoot company Printapart.com, do rapid prototyping, a new trend in manufacturing that allows inexpensive, high-resolution parts to be made in very small quantities. The technique is called additive fabrication -- instead of carving a big chunk of material into something smaller, this process adds material bit by bit to form something into the desired shape according to a computer design.

Rob Connelly, president of FineLine, is a mechanical engineering graduate of NCSU. He says the 7,000-square-foot building looks mostly like an office. "We do have something of a machine room where we have all the machines that make these parts. But it's air-conditioned and quiet and not messy. They look like a bunch of refrigerators sitting in a room. They make the parts quietly with nobody standing around them. And they work 24/7."

The company makes automotive dashboards and medical devices, among other things, but they also take orders from hobbyists and jewelry makers. For now, they can only work in plastics. But within two years, Connelly predicts, the technology will be good enough and cheap enough to do the same kind of manufacturing with metals.

For small design firms like Tackle, services like that are the equivalent of a photocopying machine introduced into an office full of carbon-paper-stained wretches.

"It's going to have a major impact on open design," Webb says. "If you have to manufacture in groups of 10,000, it's not feasible to do open design, but if anybody can click and order the thing they just downloaded, it suddenly becomes dramatically feasible. It's a major difference."

"And if they can modify it a little bit and then do it," Kuniholm adds, "then you've basically completely democratized hardware."

At some point, the Tackle team predicts, open design will make its breakthrough. "I can tell you that it's not going to be Open Prosthetics," Kuniholm says, "but there will be some product that ends up capturing public imagination and energy and ends up proving that this works."

This story originally appeared in the Independent Weekly, Durham, N.C.

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See also Innovations in Open Design.

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