Student Creates World's Fastest Shoe With a Printer

An anonymous reader writes "Engineer and designer Luc Fusaro from the Royal College of Art in London has developed a prototype running shoe that can be uniquely sculpted to any athlete's foot. It's as light as a feather too, weighing in at 96 grams. The prototype is aptly named, Designed to Win, and is 3D printed out of nylon polyamide powder, which is a very strong and lightweight material. The manufacturing process uses selective laser sintering (SLS), which fuses powdered materials with a CO2 laser to create an object. This process means 3D scans can be taken of the runner's foot so as to ensure the shoe matches the shape perfectly. Fusaro can also change the stiffness of the soles according to the athlete's physical abilities. The shoe can improve performance by 3.5%, meaning a 10 second 100-meter sprinter could see his time drop by 0.35 seconds, which is a huge time saving relatively speaking. Imagine if Usain Bolt put a pair of these running shoes on."

Comments

nylon fumes

[Gnaythan1]

I wouldn't want to print this at home though... needs a specialty place... with a fume hood.

Re:nylon fumes

[Anonymous Coward]

...which is why you print the fume hood out first, then start printing nylon shoes.

A shoe with a printer?

[Baloroth]

Why would I want a shoe with a printer?

Re:A shoe with a printer?

[oneiros27]

So if his other shoe had a printer ... then he could receive faxes! brilliant!

Citation needed

[metrometro]

3D printing is neat and all, and congrats on a new use for the tech. But can we please put these one some people and run them around before saying bullshit like "Apparently the shoe can improve performance by 3.5%"?

Re:Citation needed

[reverseengineer]

The article gets that wrong-- the 3.5% improvement is not something that's been specifically observed in this shoe. From the designer's site, "Scientific investigations have shown that tuning the mechanical properties of a sprint shoe to the physical abilities of an athlete can improve performance by up to 3.5%...." Which is to say, some sort of study has been done to demonstrate that custom-made track spikes can deliver that kind of improvement, but no data exists for this shoe specifically. The release on that site even goes on to note,"Fusaro continues to fine-tune the shoe: The upper is still too stiff to offer optimum speed. More flexibility and comfort needs to be added to the shoe, using a combination of different material or additive manufacturing processes that can offer different flexibilities in the same product."

Re:Citation needed

[HapSlappy_2222]

Depends on how you fluff the math, as always. What if I said a 3.5% performance increase, but applied it to acceleration AND max speed, and then recalculated? I don't really want to do that math but I expect it'd be as far different number than a 3.5% better time.

People that abuse statistics are the dirtiest liars of all.

Re:Citation needed

[gmhowell]

Are you kidding? a 3.5% improvement would cut hours off of my 100 yard dash times.

Re:Braaaaiiins

[wonkey_monkey]

Don't attribute to a lazy brain that which is adequately explained by a fat finger.