The world is becoming fascinated with 3D printing, eager to learn all of its capabilities. Another skill that we can tack on to its aptitude list is now creating hair. This innovation is great because people are now starting to open their mind towards creating more delicate bristle and fibrous components in objects without the expense of sourcing more hardware.
A team at Carnegie Mellon University, came up with design and its concept actually seems very familiar to crafters everywhere. Inspired by the techniques in handling a glue gun, they used a conventional fused deposition modeling (FDM) to fabricate these types of plastic hairs. You know when you are using a glue gun, you finish adhesion and pull it away, a small thin thread of melted plastic trails off still attached to the target — SAME CONCEPT. The team admits in their paper to “exploiting” this phenomenon so that users can fairly easily add hair, fibers, or bristles to any selected area of their model.
The technique is also pretty straightforward and simple for existing printers to conform to. Users can select an area on the object to add this fibrous texture to and the printer essentially places a small dollop of plastic to congeal with the existing surface then slowly pulls away, stretching the melted plastic with it creating that hair-like treatment. Various thickness and colors can be integrated for effect, also the material allows for post production techniques like cutting, curling or manual braiding to be applied as well. Currently the process is quite slow, and taking roughly 20 minutes to print about 10 square millimeters of hair.
These techniques can eventually be applied to the mass productions of items like hair pieces and toothbrushes. Check out the process in action in the video below.
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