Although our friends at Teague tipped us off about their Labs’ latest project prior to Tad Toulis’s unveiling of 13:30 at Maker Faire this past weekend, his presentation was our first time seeing the 3D-printed headphones. It’s both a thought experiment and a case study for personal fabrication, challenging the convention of “the current consumer electronics paradigm,” which is “all about mass production and distribution.” “Using 3D printing technology and consumer-sourceable components, 13:30 creates an equivalent product at an equivalent price, but made on demand—just for you.”
And while we’ve been admiring (and using) the prefab pair they sent us over the weekend—complete with custom packaging—they’ve also posted the plans on none other than Thingiverse.
With 3D printers becoming more accessible we decided to have a think around the concept “life in beta” as a future scenario. What if printed prototypes could become actual products? Meaning, once off the print bed an object could be assembled without any tools and be made functional by readily attainable components. Electronically simple yet functionally complex, headphones seemed like a good fit to stress test the premise.
Our first go resulted in a good-looking functional model created on a professional ABS FDM machine (Dimension 1200ES: print time 13 hours and 30 minutes, hence the name). It worked out well, but the machine we used isn’t accessible to the average maker, and two of the critical parts relied heavily on soluble support printing—a non-issue for professional 3D printers, a major issue for desktop 3D printers.
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