Question: Was it easy making a 3D printer?

Aisling Kerr answered on 9 Nov 2015:

Well, the short answer is no! What I had to do was get a basic plastic 3D printer (ours was an Ultimaker) and modify it to print a hydrogel into a liquid. To do this I built the plastic printer, then designed and printed a syringe holder which would push the hydrogel out. And then took apart my plastic printer and built it again with my newly printed holder! From there, I had to modify all the printer settings and write new code so that that the printer would be able to print with a gel instead of plastic.
We wanted to print a structure, called a scaffold, that cells would like to grow on, that would eventually degrade away as the cells grew. So in the end, all that would be left were cells in the shape you wanted. For example, if you wanted to grow a lung, you would print a lung shape and put in the right type of cells and incubate properly and volia! However, we were very early stages and didn’t get as far as printing anything as complicated as that.