3BA JOURNAL / ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Using 3D Printing to Eliminate Needle-Stick Injuries
From the 3BA archive. This article preserves its original publication date and historical content. Product availability, offers and technical or medical information may have changed; contact the team for current advice.
At DECAP, our mission is to eliminate the 2 million+ per-year needlestick injuries that occur in the workplace or at home. Our device lets users safely uncap, recap and dispose of needles safely, one-handed, without ever bringing their fingers near the pointy end.
For the prototyping of our device, we used external PLA on the Zortrax Inventure. Due to the direct drive system, core-xy design, and heated chamber, it consistently prints at a high quality without the issues of lower end printers. The heated chamber allows for very consistent tolerances, preventing over threading, or tightness between the parts. The Inventure is a ready-made solution, out of the box, and perfect for small businesses conducting Research and Development.
For some of the serial production, our partners at 3BA Printing Canada use their Zortrax M300 dual. The M300 Dual has a closed chamber that is passively heated through the build-plate. The HEPA filter filters out VOC's (Volatile Organic Compounds), keeping the work-environment safe. Furthermore, the fan at the top of the HEPA cover filters air in and out of the build-chamber, keeping a consistent temperature, similar in concept to the Zortrax Inventure, but without the active heating.
The M300 dual has most of the features that we enjoy with the Inventure, such as the direct drive, auto-bed leveling, and core-xy design. It is also far larger than the Inventure, allowing us to print multiple copies of the same file at once. The dual cooling fans on the M300 dual allow for printing pieces that generally need support material without any supports, conserving both time, and material. The M300 dual glass bed also allows us to achieve a very polished bottom surface on our 3D prints.
Through the use of reliable Zortrax 3D printers, we are able to provide an industrial quality product to our clients using LPD (FDM technology).