One of the new bets that the United States Navy has recently made has been to incorporate a series of industrial quality 3D printers to its Maintenance department. Thanks to this, they have been able to solve one of the most common and frustrating problems for sailors who are on the high seas, which is the fact that, due to a bad shipment, they constantly break the wireless headphone adapters ship and run out of spare parts.
With this problem they found themselves on the aircraft carrier 'Harry S. Truman'than a few weeks after setting sail from its base. The real problem was that, by then, the ship was already on the high seas and they had to place an order, wait for it to be manufactured and delivered in the middle of the ocean. Just then in the Maintenance Department, with little experience in 3D printing issues, they decided to take action on the matter and expedite delivery of headphone adapters as much as possible.
Tru Clip, an adapter created by the navy using 3D printing
After a few days of work, it was finally achieved design and build an ideal solution in the form of a small piece of plastic that contains the damaged adapter of the radio and also has a hole to house the antenna. The piece, baptized by its designers as'Tru Clip'was tested on the ship itself and was instantly successful. As the Navy itself has calculated, the use of this new piece of plastic has saved them, in all the time the mission ship has been on, about $ 42.000.
One of the advantages of this type of object, as its authors comment, is that the STL file can be transferred over the Internet, so this piece can be manufactured on any ship that is equipped with a 3D printer. As a final detail, tell you that this file has also been sent to the International Space Station so that from there the astronauts themselves can create this piece in case it is necessary.