14 DAY TRIAL // Footwear made by automated means invariably costs a lot less than anything reliant on direct human manufacture. So what happens when a fully automated process can produce it in minutes?
Leather sandals, apparently. A really nifty pair of sandals. Human involvement isn't nonexistent, since someone has to dress the shoes in leather, but the things can definitely be created quickly and cheaply.
What you're looking at is a pair of footwear created by Hans Fouche, with some help from an acquaintance of his, Mr. Azuka.
Fouche used his home-made Cheetah 3D printer to achieve this success. Contrary to conventional 3D printers, the Cheetah is more focused on speed than on quality.
The “blanks” aren't pretty because they don't need to be
Support structures, foundations and pretty much everything else that ends up covered up by something else seldom look nice.
There is no point in beautification if no one is going to ever see an object anyway. Besides, sometimes it would affect the durability.
That may not be the case here, but the former argument stands: the blanks don't need to look pretty, because they are dressed in leather.
This means that there is no reason not to let the Cheetah 3D printer live up to its namesake and produce the pair of shoes in 6 minutes flat.
Now consider that shoes can take days to weeks to be made by conventional means. We definitely see a future when the Cheetah replaces assembly lines.
How the Cheetah makes it all happen
It's in the layer size. Cheetah deposits filament in layers 10 times as tall as normal FDM/FFF 3D printers. The printing itself, the print head, can also move faster. Much faster, by a factor of 12, to be precise.
The most important thing, however, is that the Cheetah has 10 extruders. That's right, not one, two or four, but ten. Definitely makes Fouche's next plan feasible, which is to cut down the time of production even further by adding 10 more extruders.
ABS plastic was used to create the shoe “blanks” which Mr. Azuka, Fouche's acquaintance, dressed in fine-looking leather not long after. He also attached rubber soles.
The new shoes will be sold in limited quantities at some point in the future, to see if there is any interest.
