Industrial grade 3-D printers will be available next month at the Cal State Long Beach library basement. These machines will remain untouched and bound in large wooden crates until they’re moved into the newly renovated ground floor area of the library come March.
The renovated area, soon to be known as the Innovation Lab, will have a soft opening at the end of this semester followed by a ribbon cutting ceremony in fall 2018 conducted by Dean of the Library Roman Kochan.
According to Kochan, the printers were helped funded by the Student Excellence Fee approved by Associated Students Inc. two years ago. The Innovation Lab also contributed a $500,000 donation given by a library supporter.
These devices will be open for all students to use and are intended to help ease the demand for printers in the biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and industrial design departments.
“3-D printers are very useful for prototyping, and making a 3-D printer gives a lot of computer coding experience, as well as electrical and mechanical [experience],” said Dylan Evans, former president of the Maker’s Society on campus.
“A lot of design students and engineers working on their final projects would come to [Maker’s Society] with a computer model, and we would help them make it come to life,” Evans said. “It opens up a lot of doors in the design process and leaves room for trial and error.”
This has been the case for university alumnus Stephen Rivera, an employee at Meggitt Defense, where 3-D printing is used as a tool for engineers to be able to produce quality parts in place of costly components.
“3-D printed parts saves both time and money,” said Rivera in an email. “By printing components that will be experiencing low stresses, we can greatly increase the productivity of test hardware, bringing the complete and final design to fruition much faster [with] a lower cost overall.”