He made his own 3D printed teeth and saved thousands $! (photos)

There is an inverse relation between having a healthy set of teeth and a full pocket. If your lucky enough to have inherited your parents’ perfect genes then you have no problem. But what if you’re not of those “blessed ones”. You’ll have to fork out a fortune to correct crooked teeth. Unless, of course, you are tech savvy and use your your ingenuity like Amos Dudley. Amos, an undergraduate at New Jersey Institute of Technology created his own plastic braces using a 3D printer for only $60, saving thousands of dollars in the process! Amos Dudley had braces in middle school, but he didn’t wear a retainer like he was supposed to, so his teeth slowly shifted back. Dudley wrote that he was an unlikely combination of two things: He was broke, but had access to a high-quality 3D printer through his university. He took full advantage of this.
The process wasn’t exactly easy. He had to research orthodontic procedures and plot the route of his successive braces, so his teeth would move in the right way. But once that was done, all it took was fabricating a series of models out of relatively inexpensive plastic, and then following through on wearing them. Amos now has the perfect smile for only 6o bucks, a lot of research and some luck!

Before

After

The laser scanning was reasonably painless, he says, though he describes the NextEngine software interface as “awful.”

3D printing of the molds

3D-printed mold

Dudley sanded down the edges