Here are a pair of inspirational stories of post-injury redemption via Inhabitat: a heartstring-puller about Beauty the bald eagle with a 3D-printed beak, and the story of Sun Jifa, who should probably get an honorary Core77 Design Award for the DIY category for making his own prosthetic arms out of scrap metal.
via MSNBC
The high-tech tale, on the other hand (no pun intended), dates back to 2008, though the backstory begins in 2005, when a bald eagle named Beauty had the top of her beak shot off and was left to die. “The resulting damage from the bullet left Beauty with only a small portion of her left upper beak and nearly eliminated the majority of the right side.” The Alaskan rescuers who found her nursed her back to health but it was Jane Fink Cantwell of Birds of Prey NW, an Idaho nonprof, who took up Beauty’s cause, connecting with Nate Calvin of Kinetic Engineering Group to create a 3D-printed beak for the disfigured raptor.
Check it out:
The “beauty” puns start within the first ten seconds, and it only goes downhill from there…
I’d hesitate to agree that Nate Calvin is “literally breaking new ground” here—it’s a beak, not a building—but the task certainly demanded a bit of innovation and experimentation.
While the above clip glosses the 18-month R&D process behind the beak, an ABC story features footage of the fitting process; considering that the first video actually shows the dentist performing the procedure, I was curious whether they had cast the damaged beak for fit. The second video (below) suggests otherwise, and I imagine that they modeled the cavity based on other specimens as Calvin and his colleagues are shown determining the fit through trial-and-error. If the videos express a general sense of hyperbole with regard to the bionic applications of rapid prototyping—ABC namedrops stereolithographic assembly, “worth $50,000″—bear in mind that this was back in 2008, and it looks like the ABC clip was produced prior to the actual operation.
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