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Student Creates World's Fastest Shoe With a Printer

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-print-it-they-will-run dept.

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."

4 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. A shoe with a printer? by Baloroth · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why would I want a shoe with a printer?

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    "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  2. Citation needed by metrometro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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%"?

    1. Re:Citation needed by reverseengineer · · Score: 5, Informative

      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."

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      "FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
    2. Re:Citation needed by gmhowell · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon