3-d -- the leadership of howard county in maryland, county executive ken allman, howard county economic development authority ceo larry twiel and the director of the maryland center of entrepreneurship are a strong leadership team for howard county and they easily saw the vision and the opportunity that these technologies brought and how it fit in with and supported small business and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. 3-d maryland is an initiative addressing barriers to entry and advancing the business advantages for business, industry and entrepreneurs, our target audiences. raising awareness and facilitating engagement in implementation. it is identifying and addressing opportunities to strengthen and advance the rapid tech ecosystem in maryland. and we're building a loosely coupled system of collaborative relationships and partnerships across sectors to innovate and accelerate the region and the country's economic competitiveness.

i respectfully recommend that this committee encourage and support initiatives such as 3d maryland that have a focus on multisector, cross disciplinary precompetitive collaboration building on the strengths and core competencies to advantage practices, foster innovation and grow regional ecosystems taking advantage of public funding sources. supporting initiatives like 3d maryland builds on the momentum created by recent initiatives such as the national manufacturing national additive manufacturing institute. addressing and creating an adaptive work force that all points on the spectrum is critical to our engagement of these technologies. i would recommend working at the grassroots level, locally with users, with proven track records from both industry and education. so we can institute some changes in k through 16, vocational training and apprenticeship programs, et cetera. wider adoption is inevitable. we need to ensure that the work force is prepared to increase

engagement. studies have shown that students who are educated in additive manufacturing processes are among the first to bring the advanced hands-on technologies to their employers something i have told my students since i established that lab. you are work force leaders. continuing to support research funding and programs that facilitate technology transfer, 3-d printing and additive manufacturing are just getting started. i thank you very much for your attention and your consideration of these technologies. >> thank you very much. we will recess just until after this series of votes. great. and then we'll come back and start with questions. committee is in recess. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and i thank all of the panelists for a very impressive testimony. it's interesting stuff. i know on the way over to votes a while ago, i was talking to mr. bentivolio who has some experience in your field and it's fascinating to talk about the possibilities and what all you're doing. so as a small business guy it's

very rewarding to see the entrepreneurial aspect of this and folks are really doing some good stuff. one of the concerns that i have is, you know, getting start-ups like what you do and because it's a rather new product and process from the standpoint of not widely used i guess, are the regulatory problems we need to be aware of here in congress that we need to put a stop to or ways we could enhance your ability to do your job better? just go down the line. whoever has some comments or concerns about -- everybody has concerns about washington these days, trust me, and rightly so. mr. o'neill, do you want to start? any problems with us? >> i do not yet have any problems with you. >> not yet. >> the keyword yet, right. obviously the health care law is something that concerns a lot of small business people and you're at that 50 if i recall. >> yes, we are. >> so that may be a concern to you, but from the standpoint of producing your products that's the kind of regulations i'm --

>> i figure if we just keep working hard, designing great products and making money everything else will figure it out. >> so far you guys are ahead of regulations you've outrun them and probably are okay until somebody figures out we need to stop these guys and regulate them. >> i don't want that to happen. our feet haven't hit the ground. we shipped our first order out of our house less than three years ago and, you know, now we keep moving, we've got 17,500 square foot facility and that's not big enough. we need a bigger one. i understand that there are some complications and i let other people in our business worry about those things probably why i don't seem concerned. i'm sure i should be, but -- >> hire people to worry for you, right? >> i really do because i don't like to worry. >> i understand. mr. cobb? >> thanks. yeah. go back to the beginning of stratasys which is really started like i said in '88. we've shipped about 50% of our business overseas and we continue to do that at this point in time.

it's been a big piece of our business. so, you know, if you look at areas that we're concerned about or could be concerned about, would be any export laws that would restrict the -- this technology from moving out from the u.s. i mean, if you look at the bulk of our business, we manufacture in new hampshire, we manufacture in new york, and we manufacture in minnesota. and so all these products are being exported. so anything that would harm that export -- >> at this point there is no problem with that area. that's not a barrier yet. >> there's been some discussion about that. since i had the opportunity to address the question. >> we want to be watchful for that. that's the purpose of the hearing, to make sure we know those things ahead of time.

>> yep. mr. wejmarshausen. i'm sorry. >> well, we are not really concerned about things that are currently in place, but there might be something that you could help with or think of. shapeaways has a large community of designers that make their own ideas come to life using our platform. they upload them to our site and have them printed and we ship it back to them. and the other element of shapeaways is that we enable people to open shops where they can start selling these products and i brought a few you can see in front of me. now if some of these products currently infringe copyrights which very rarely but it does happen, then the dmca gives a very nice process where the copyright holder can send us a notice, we take down the product from our website, and the story or the discussion then is between the copyright holder and the person that is allegedly the infringer. that process kills very well. you have to realize we have 400,000 community members growing quickly. 100,000 new designs every month.

these numbers are really large. and dmca helps with the copyright end of the spectrum. however there is no such process for patents. so if someone would infringe a patent there is no clear process that would enable, you know, the patent holder to notify us so we can take it down and then the discussion becomes between the copyright or the patent infringer and patent holder. in that case, platforms like shapeaways are a party to the discussion which, of course, is really hard for us because we get so many new designs that it's completely impossible for us to check, also given the fact that in most cases we only print things only once, it's completely impossible to check whether there are patent infrigments going on at the time. we're open to build compelling technology to help solve this, but since the dmca works so well for copyrights i would, you know, suggest maybe think about

having a similar type process for platforms like shapeaways and there is others coming up as well, in the united states and also abroad, to have such a process that can help these platforms stay scalable and flexible. >> do you have disclosure statements that you have to sign whenever you are sent a drawing of some kind by an individual or a company that says if you produce this object, that you are -- you are restricted from showing it to anybody else or anything like that? >> the idea about shapeaways since it's a community is openness. our terms and conditions do ask people, do you own the copyrights, the rights to use this product and upload it to shapeaways for one. do you have the rights to have it manufactured for yourself and do you have the rights if you want to sell it to others? and people have to state that they have those rights, of course. however, you know, some people might not read that. >> very good. my time is up. otherwise i would i would let miss baum answer. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you for coming in. yes, we had an interesting

discussion on the way to votes about the possibilities of 3-d printing. and i explained to my colleagues that i was a vocational education teacher as well as general ed and in the automotive design business almost 20 years and i'm very familiar with 3d printing and proud to say that many of my female students went on to case western to study biomechanical engineering because of cad and some of the things they got to make in my classroom using 3d printer at the time. we sent the design, they printed it for like $35, they sent it back in a nice package. instead of putting something on the refrigerator door, hey, mom and dad, look what i did in class, they got to put it on a table which was kind of interesting. but in that regards, i'm wondering, the possibilities, we're looking at some things like, for instance, one of my questions is, if i took -- could scan something, can i, you know, digitize that and have it made, right?

so, for instance, hip replacements, that kind of thing, could i use an x-ray data and convert it to digital and then have a custom made hip for a patient if i was a doctor? >> and there's some regulations that would have to come with that too, right? i mean it has to be sterile, made from specific material? we can do that with bone as well as if somebody crushed a bone, we could replace that using a 3-d printer and how long would that take, for instance? i'm not a doctor, is so i couldn't even name a bone in my wrist. >> both of those examples are in current practice today. so most of that, to my understanding, most of that work is being done abroad in germany and sweden. our cam is one of the oems in sweden producing hip replacements. while we can take the personalized data from a ct scan or mri scan and digitize that and make -- build that into a three dimensional model right now what we're doing is creating

the hip replacements in a small, medium, large, three or four sizes, because that does the job and does the job most effectively. and there are -- i'm going to not -- may not remember the name of the university that is doing the bone planting. i think it's in texas. growing bone structures. but biomedical engineering is huge, yeah. yeah. and i mean what i would say, i would share with you at johns hopkins university, there's a skull surgeon by the name of dr. dorshar and he uses 3-d printing to create 3-d prints to do preop planning and he -- so they know before the team ever goes into the operating room, exactly what the cuts are, what's removed, what -- where the staples are, everything done to simplify that process. i think that's fantastic. the doctor is working less hours in a stressful situation, the patient under anesthesia less time and the operating costs are a huge contributor to health care costs and that's lower. this is disruptive technology. now that's upsetting -- that's going to upset the apple cart in

many directions. so the business model for hospitals is now going to be disrupted. they may not be so happy about operating room costs -- operating room times being declined because they have to go back and rework the numbers again. health care, medical is one of the first industries to engage 3-d printing and additive manufacturing. >> great. so we can actually, for instance, if there was somebody that needed plastic surgery, a plastic surgeon could use the x-rays and know where his cuts are going to be, how he's going to repair this patient's face? >> absolutely. and they also use 3-d printing for surgical guides. so they put the 3-d print on the patient's body and know the tool, the cut, the angle. they take a lot of the -- it takes a lot of the guesswork out. and i would just also volunteer that in terms of what 3-d maryland one of our first activities was to create an

expert user group to gather all the expert users in maryland around these technologies and cross pollinate them and the applied physics lab is actually collaborating with dr. dorshar to build robotics to make that surgery even better, to make it even smoother. we're printing cells. i'm not sure again like who the doctor is doing this, printing skin, but they're printing skin during surgery from the patient itself. when you print cells from a patient, you really limit the risk of rejection or the body rejecting whatever you're putting in or on it. >> okay. so now we have that. and it also reduces 3-d printing, prototype build time, correct? no longer are we doing the giant clay models. we can actually design parts, for instance, for a motorcycle? i could design everything on that motorcycle using a 3-d printing, put it together, make

sure it fits and reduce my build time and prototype costs to -- do you have any numbers? >> when i see the case studies roll through, john can probably speak to this even more clearly, but when i see the case studies roll through and go what am i going to present like a baseline i think many times it's at least a third or fifth of both the cost savings and time savings. and then the other thing, too, like you have those savings but when you put those parts together and not quite right you're not going back to square one. you're tweaking. >> how long would it take, real quickly, how long would it take for me, for instance, once i have that information digitized and i'm going to do the surgery, to have maybe a model that i can practice or look at? how long would that take to have that prototype or the 3-d print. >> really, those are hard questions because you don't know how much data, what the scale is, and scale is a factor. i would say so from thinking about dr. dorshar's skulls and he uses sla technology, i think those skulls probably take three or four hours maybe.

maybe six hours. and what i'm advocating from maryland, i think it's a model that we could all look at, is that we -- that maryland create a conshore shum based mod really we have state-of-the-art medical facilities so that dr. dorshar can see a patient from shock trauma and zip files right over to a local center and get them. we don't have to worry about fedex anymore. we'll start to really see improvements in the technology as well. >> i started in business, mr. chairman, when we took a body side molding on the car, sent it to the shop and waited three months to get a prototype model and now we can get it done in a matter of hours, right? thank you very much. i really appreciate you being here. i yield back, mr. chairman. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i'm sorry i missed the opening part. i was caught up in another hearing. thank you all for coming. so i may well be asking questions you answered and if that's the case, i apologize. i'll go back.

i have a little experience in 3-d. we've been using that for five or six years in one of my companies to make small-scale models of fairly complex machinery as part of our sales proposal. you know, if it's a $6 million proposal it's well worth delivering that and maybe others are going to catch up but early on we were the only one doing it and a wow factor there and then we got the order everyone in the customers company wanted another one. so it is great. it's great for a lot of things. we use it as a sales tool. my question comes to, as this takes off, are there any quality control issues on repeatability and all the things you do in iso and other quality things for repeatability, and, you know, cnc machines and whatever. i'm a machine shop guy. are there quality control issues and once you get into production and out of prototyping, i'm not

sure who to ask, if somebody wants to jump in. >> so since we're building a hundreds of thousands of products, over a month actually at shapeaways, we see these kind of problems pop up. we make, for instance, very popular iphone cases and, of course, for them to fit and to be clear, shapeaways doesn't provide prototyping only. we print final products. my iphone case i use myself is 3-d printed and many other people buy from shapeaways just to get a unique iphone case. they need to be exact fit. and since 3-d printing was used for a long time as a prototyping technology there is definitely need for the technology to improve from a quality perspective, from a price, and even from a speed perspective to meet the needs of today's consumers. from prototyping perspective you always have somewhat of an option if the prototype doesn't come out right to do it again. if you have a consumer who has a birthday party where he needs to bring a present you have only

one shot to get it out the door in time. the technology has come a long way and great we can make final products and enable so many people, but i think the technology is still to my opinion in its infancy and it will keep growing as the big consumer market ages. there will be large jumps in how the technology will mature. >> so, you know, as you're layering this, plastics, i understand, i'm sure powdered metals are probably being used some ceramics. >> yep. >> is that the place and what happens when you get into the need for some really high alloy steel, stainless steel, et cetera? is that way out or never? >> we are printing metals in several times. we print in silver, the same type quality you would find in a jewelry store, ceramics, in stainless steel, brass, bronze, we're adding other precious metals soon. it's already possible. >> carbon steel too? >> not yet. >> okay. >> is that coming do you believe? >> yeah.

>> okay. >> so as this takes off, what is the thought on the cost? you know, today you've got a lot of machines running unattended. labor cost is all but zero. set a machine up and they pop those out in a dark factory. is this similar or -- what would be the labor costs to make a part using 3-d versus automated equipment today in a factory that the machine just does it without man power? >> sure. >> i think you look at where 3-d printing is being utilized today and as mentioned before, it is being utilized in a manufacturing environment. aerospace company, automotive companies, a number of people are using 3-d printing today. so i think we were where it makes sense is, not the things we're thinking about where, you know, you're making tens of millions of bottle caps or something like that, but where

it makes sense at this point in time, is when you have a short production type of run or custom run or something where, you know, because of regulations or other reasons, the part is constantly changing and so when you look at the costs of a piece part, the piece part cost you're going to get utilizing 3d printing is going to be more than injection molding. however, you're not going to have to build that tool. so as a small business owner, couple cases that were mentioned here today, you're not going to have that up front cost. you're also probably not going to have to have that up front knowledge as well because you can design some test it with a prototype and then start printing that as, you know, as your real part. so it's a little bit different as far as high volume versus mid to low volume. i believe. >> thank you very much.

my time has expired. i yield back. >> mr. bain. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i would like to thank the panel for their testimony today. you know with the rapid growth and accessibility of 3-d printing, there is room for great innovation as it's been stated. as many of you testified 3d printing creates opportunities for entrepreneurs. however, with companies like makerbot, do you feel eventually consumers will become their own manufacturers making their services and many small businesses that -- small business offer obsolete? >> you know, certainly makerbot and products like that really enable a lot of people to do work as far as design work and then some production type of work that we were talking about. and i think for certain products, yeah, you could see

where a product like makerbot would actually be used in a home environment. i think, though, that where some of the big opportunities for 3d printing comes in is really in the manufacturing process. it, as we talked about before, it allows current manufacturers to build things in a different manner, to customize things in a different way, so i think there's certainly some products that yeah, are absolutely geared toward that but if you look at the use of 3-d printing and all the different materials that are going on today, i think the bigger advances are going to come in the manufacturing area. and with that comes a whole area where, you know, students today or people in the work place today are used to manufacturing and traditional methods. so training of people that are currently employed or training

of students to design, utilizing 3d printing is one thing, but then to manufacture using 3d printing is vastly different. it's different than injection molding. but it can be used, in fact, and that's one of the big inhibitors i think in getting 3-d printing into small and medium sized companies is because characteristics of a 3-d printer are different than the characteristics of injection molding, for instance. >> on another note i serve on homeland security as well, and the potential of creating weapons through this 3-d printing, what is the feasibility, the possibility,

and, you know, someone coming along and creating a nondetectable firearm or something? >> well, we've been staunch supporters of the plastic gun legislation that got re-enacted i think at the end of last year as a matter of fact. so it's something that has been demonstrated at some point. but we've certainly been a supporter of the legislation that's taken place up to this point. looking at the restrictions on that opportunity. >> okay. but someone could -- could someone potentially, you know, not follow the guidelines and regulations for this type of product and create something that's not detectable and cause a problem? >> i'm -- i'm not an expert in it but i think that you need some type of metal, either a bullet or the firing mechanism, to -- for the firearm, so again,

i'm not an expert on that, but from what i know i think it would be difficult. >> okay. >> thank you. >> thank you, mr. chairman. it always makes me nervous when the technology like this is here in congress because it means we're paying attention to you and let's face it, when the bureaucracy pays attention to a technology we often try to regulate it or screw it up. and i say this in the contents of someone that believes one of the great successes of the internet was the fact that it grew and grew and grew before sort of the bureaucratic mechanisms truly understood it and were able to slow down the investments, the capital, the creativity. so what is -- for whether it be 3-d printing or even the thing that maybe you and i haven't

even found out to define yet which may be the large scale or the high speed production of such, what's the systemic threat to the industry? is it copyright? is it the source files having patent litigation or copyright litigation chasing? or is it those of us in government and bureaucracy? if i came to you and said over the next decade, this is one of the great disruptive technologies that's going to make us a more efficient society but we have to conquer these risks to that expansion, for each of you? start with mr. o'neill, what would you say, what are the systemic risks to the technology? >> well, i'm an entrepreneur so i'm not representing the manufacturers. we use the technology to create innovation in our own business. so, you know, these kind of questions don't really apply to us, but i would sincerely hope

no legislation comes in that would restrict our ability. >> what about the discussion that i -- i know we've all been run pg in and out so i haven't heard, copyright? >> copyright is a concern to us as a copyright holder and a holder -- as a holder of 30 patents i'm concerned that people will infringe our patents and our designs and they'll print them and we've had that happen. we had that happen with shapeaways. but we worked with them and they were able to deal with it. it's a concern. it seems like, you know, something that needs to be addressed but i don't -- i'm not sure it's a 3d printing specific concern because it's still -- ip is ip. people in china making counterfeit products all the time of us. they're not doing that with 3-d printing but traditional manufacturing. >> what's the systemic risk on ip, i think there's been the discussion of saying if i change a bit of the source code does

that relieve me of a copyright? >> well, i guess as a manufacturer, you know, the laws in this country, you have the patent protection from a manufacturer, what we do is we spend 10 to 12% of our overall revenue on trying to be more innovative, staying ahead of things that will fall out as far as a patent goes. i think looking at -- you talked about what can be inhibitor. one of the things, maybe a little off base here, but i think one of the things that will not help the industry as much as possible is people, young people, and traditional workers, not being educated in this technology. and i think as a real opportunity at this point in time to have education at a high school level, at a grade school

level, and then even workers that are displaced, because of manufacturing -- i think manufacturing is starting to come back into the u.s. and i think 3d printing is a portion of that and i think there's a real opportunity for the federal government to get more involved in training of new students and traditional work force. >> but to understand, we get involved, there's also certain risk profiles that come with that. >> i understand. >> what would be a systemic risk to your business? >> well, i already laid it out briefly, is that, you know, an issue you mentioned, we want to -- shapeaways is a platform of service so what we want to do is create as many products for people as they like and make it possible for them to create things that weren't possible before. in that way democratizing how people think about products. everybody can make things instead of only big companies. but we are taking very serious the responsibility that we need

to take that we can only make things that are original. and the good thing is, you know, shapeaways has made over 2.5 million products to date that the amount of products that we had to take down, the amount of products that we actually made using the printers, that were infringing in hindsight were extremely small like in counting on one hand or two hands. less than ten that we actually made. that's i think the good thing because people grasp that they can now make anything they want, it's not the first inclination. the technology is much more expandable than mass manufacturing so much easier to copy something popular with traditional manufacturing technologies as mentioned in china perhaps, then you can do on a 3-d printer. >> and forgive me, i'm up against time, academia has an interesting world where it sits there, where what's sort of in the public domain, what is -- so you may have to navigate some more interesting discussion there. >> well, i guess what i would -- my response to the question is, may bridge academia, may not.

i'm an advocate of the technology for business industry and entrepreneurs. and what i hear from my expert users one of the things that's going to hold the industry back is proprietariness of both the hardware and the materials. so i think the expert users that i see using the technology in the most advanced way, say to the oems i don't care about your warranty, i want under the hood and they will hire a third party contractor that provides the warranty so that they then can put in any material they want and they can tweak the parameters. if you -- if you don't do that, then you are paying about $25,000 per set of parameters to be under the hood. and so -- i know peter agrees with me. keeping the technology open just like your example your leading example of the internet you got to keep it open. the u.s. is not a leader in this technology. i think the western world is leading it, but -- >> i know i'm way over time. real quick, the code, the

underlying code, proprietary to each manufacturer or sort of a common script? >> proprietary? the parameters you run the machine on and the materials you put into the machine. >> yeah. if i were to hop on-line right now and want to start design and actually do some coding, i'm a decade old, out of date, sql programmer. >> i'm going to let john jump in on that one. >> well, i think if i understand your question correctly, the capability of sending a file -- >> how proprietary is the software for each manufacturer. >> the software to actually allow you to print a part? correct. >> i'll answer two ways. the software that allows you to have access to the printer is common. it's called an stl file.

that's common to all the different companies that are out there. then what's proprietary would be actually how the printer prints. each one of them uses a variety of different technologies and parameters so that would be proprietary if that answers your question. >> mr. chairman, thank you for your patience with me. thank you. >> could each of you -- you all brought a variety of things. starting with mr. o'neill can you tell us what you've got in front of you? or show it off. >> sure. well as i said before, when we -- we have to bring products to market quickly because the iphone refreshes every year and usually refreshes around september or october. so to get the products into the stores for the holiday season, we have to be very quick. so whenever there's rumors on the internet we'll take those rumors and take the specification actually print a copy of an iphone. copy of an iphone. a 3-d one based on the rumors. then we'll print a product that would hold our lenses, a clip,

that, you know, to see how it fits, see how well, it works and evaluate whether we're happy with that. we'll keep working on this through all the rumors. every time there's a new rumor we'll do a new one and hundreds of designs of the product to get it right. when apple does release the phone, then we've got this product that we can put on there and test our lenses on the new device, we can test the fit and how it is, and then if we're happy with everything we send it out to manufacturing and have tooling made so we can do injection molding and then we're in production and that whole process takes about six to eight weeks. >> mr. cobb? >> little bit picking up on what patrick was talking about. this particular part was a part that really gets the idea of taking a prototype into a realistic area. what we've done is utilized a printing process, somewhat similar to an ink jet printer, but it gives you really the realism you get from a part and that's what a manufacturer or

designer is looking for. in the particular process that we're using here, called poly jet, what it allows to do is mix materials. so you have something very durable, call it digital abs the white part but at the same time printing this flexible material as well. this was printed as one part. okay. then just recently, we introduced the capability of the multiple material and then we've added color to that. you can actually then print a very realistic in this case a prototype shoe but a realistic prototype shoe that to most people coming in here looking at this, you would probably think it was the real thing. and then getting towards the idea of real things, this particular part is a different technology that we have called fdm. this particular technology takes real thermal plastic, so nylon, poly carbonates, abs that are

being used today in manufacturing, typically in injection mold process, but in this particular case, this is in the abs part that we're seeing here, this was printed, again, about 18 different components here, this was all printed in one particular piece. okay. so from a prototyping standpoint it allows you to look at a lot of different things that are going on because it's not just an individual part, it's the assembly and this particular prototyping technology allows you to look at those assemblies, testing for form, fit and function. and then as you go a little further, you can also because it's real thermal plastics these are the types of materials being used in real life today for end use parts in aerospace, automotive, some consumer goods. >> well, i brought a variety of products. it's hard to choose if there's so many people creatively active. so in my testimony i used an example of a design collector from new york called gotham smith and they make men's jewelry. these are cuff links that are

made in sterling silver, designed by them and they're for sale on our platform and they sell it in a different way. so that's one example. another that is really cool is a game. just almost organic movement crowd funded, the space program, they made a little game and very passionate community behind it and few guys figured out can we take our assets from the game and turn them into real things. unloaded it to shapeaways and was working. so now this is people -- went on the internet and went viral and everybody wants to have them. two very different examples. i mentioned nervous system, they use algorithms, they don't design the products by hand, no cat software involved. they write computer code that mimics nature and by doing that they can create unique items all the time. this is an example of a light shade with an led light inside.

you can go on their website, on shapeaways, you can find these products and they are for sale. miss baum has brought another products. customizable necklace and this is also from nervous systems. so you can see it's a wide variety from jewelry to lighting fixtures to gadgets and game accessories and i can keep going for hours but i won't. >> miss baum. >> right now i'm wishing i had selected my samples a little differently and i had some skulls sitting up here and the face transplant model that dr. rodriguez did a year ago. the other thing that i wish i had brought is an example of 3-d printing with a -- with traditional metal plating over top of it. one of the companies in maryland, they plate specifically on 3-d printed objects extending the life of the plastic prints. some of the work they could is highly classified but what's in

the knowledge center at 3-d maryland is one tenth scale thruster they made for boeing and those objects are impressive. what i have in front of me are prototype soles from under armour, an anchor business for baltimore for sure. probably as much as i'm able to say. close friend with under armour and frequently behind the door with them. but so right now, their prototyping soles. this is a watch and this is off of mr. cobb's systems and the same idea of the gear shifter. very flexible material and rigid at the same time. end use product for northrop northrop grumman located in near land, an end-use part. prototyping and end use parts metal printed part that had post-production machining done on it and then i guess i would

just tag on with peter about this little guy. this particular printer prints in full color and we talk about entrepreneurs and talk about the uses of the technology, if you take a 3-d photograph of yourself or maybe your daughter or your grandchildren and you want to have that replicated into a doll, your kids can have dolls that look like them if that's what you want to do. mickey labs is doing that in the uk. stanley black and decker located in maryland, uses this to color code the parts of their tools as a they put it through production. orange one division, green another division or code the parts. that's not an extra. that's inherent to the technology. the last sample i have that i'll talk about is this architectural model. we're all probably old enough to understand that architectural models before 3-d printing were made with knives and map board. today we can print the prototype of the building and there's a saying in the industry if a picture is worth a thousand words a prototype is worth a thousand pictures. as our society gets more and more visual, our literacy declines a little bit, but become more visual that's more and more true. lastly in my testimony i

included a really nice profile of a company in baltimore by the name of danco arlington, a traditional fountry, wonderful american story, 94-year-old family owned business, three or four generations and they started losing their pattern makers and they said, how are we going to solve this problem? they don't want to see this successful business change. and so they adopted 3-d printing in 2010. they have a number of stratasys machines. the highest end machine that stratasys makes and they say they win bids because they send a prototype of the object they are going to create for the defense industry with the bid and how they get successful bids. >> you all bring up an interesting point too. in terms of your different mediums that you print with, you know, how does that translate into durability or strength or whatever the case may be? i'll let any one of you answer that wants to. >> i'm going to point the finger

to mr. cobb because he's got the highest end materials. >> you know, the bulk of our business is in the thermal plastic area. i talked about the nylons and poly carbonates. and traditional manufacturing would be utilizing an injection molding process to bring those parts. we don't quite do that. we don't get -- we don't melt it and put pressure into it. we use the layer technology that we all talked about in the past. so the characteristics of that are different than the traditional injection molding. we are using real abs, real nylon, and real poly carbonate. a wide variety of manufacturers around the world. we just select one of those. so the difference is not in the material itself, but the difference is, in the way the part is actually manufactured. and so what i was talking earlier, we talked about having

the knowledge from a designer, the knowledge from a tool maker, and the knowledge from a manufacturer, to understand that a 3-d printed part is in our case a real thermal plastic but it's made differently than the traditional injection molding. been around for a long period of time, a handbook that talks about injection molding, the principles to make sure they build a durable part. there's no such thing for 3-d printing or additive manufacturing today and as the technology evolves, new materials evolve, and they're evolving every single day. having that knowledge to understand the differences between injection molded part in the case of a thermal plastic and a 3-d printed part will be important in producing more and more parts for end users because they can be used utilizing 3-d printing they are being used today but it's a different design criteria, different manufacturing method and it's different.

>> can you take -- say you don't have a drawing or you don't have a -- you're doing just in the restoration industry, out of curiosity, can you take an existing or wore out part and create data points and reproduce that? and how expensive is this for somebody to -- like if they employ or call somebody, they obviously don't want to buy the technology themselves, they just as soon have somebody do it for them? how expensive is it to create that part as a model to be able to fit up? >> you can use technologies that are getting more and more powerful today. we were at south by southwest where we were [ inaudible ]

you can take a part and if it's still in one piece you can scan it. you need to see all items of it. and those are getting very affordable. they turned pictures basically they take into a mold you can print and then you can print it in a wide variety of materials. to your point of questions around what does it cost, the scanners are available from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands if you want high end professional stuff. the printing itself, again depending on the material you want to use, items the size of an iphone case would cost you 20, $30, things ha are getting bigger are 50 to $100 in plastics.

if you talk about metal obss the size of this are around 100 to $200. but this is like real stainless steel. so you know, you can make things in silver, all kinds of materials, based on scans if you wanted to for repairing stuff and it's been done. >> you can build up in metal? >> sorry? >> you can build up in metal? >> yes. metals are possible like ceramics and plastics, yeah. >> fascinating. with that i want to thank you all for participating today and again, i apologize for the vote series that happened during the hearing. your testimony is obviously helped us to better understand how 3-d printing is spurring economic growth and creating a lot of opportunities, lot of opportunities out there for entrepreneurs around the nation. with that i would ask unanimous consent all members have five days to submit materials for the record. seeing none so ordered and without objection hearing is adjourned. on our next washington journal, ron kessler discusses security breaches at the white house and what the