HOUGHTON – Crear Manos Por Los Ninos owns the only 3-D printer in Nicaragua, where basic materials for the devices are hard to come by, says Crear Manos’ Eric Friesen. But it’s not yet pumping out free artificial hands for amputees, the goal of the organization.

That’s largely because the plastic filament used as raw material for the printers is nearly impossible to come by in Nicaragua, Friesen said, and shipping and customs costs make them prohibitively expensive to import.

So Crear got ahold of Joshua Pearce and his team at the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability and Technology (MOST) Lab, where 3-D printing software and designs are shared openly on the web for anyone to improve on.

“They contacted us about using alternate filaments, weed whacker filament, fishing line and recycled materials,” said Pearce.

It didn’t take long for the lab to develop a prototype hand that can be made at least partly with fishing line, which was tremendous news for Friesen, an American expatriate who’s been living in Nicaragua for years.

“That’s at any ocean port. You can get that all over the place,” he said.

Even better, Pearce expects the rapid evolution of the hands to continue. More of each hand will come from the fishing line, he said. The hands themselves will be better, and the printers will be able to produce the final components that now have to be purchased and added separately.

It’s not that Pearce thinks the MOST lab will make all the improvements. With the open-source nature of the project, just about anyone with the knowledge and the will can play a part, he said.

Open source means that anyone with an interest, amateur or professional, can download the design specifications and software that tell a 3-D printer how to make a hand, or whatever. They can tinker, come up with improvements and repost those.

The process leads to fast, continuous improvement, Pearce said, and loosely affiliated groups have “been able to do things that a company couldn’t do,” he said.

“It’s an organic model, and you can’t beat Mother Nature,” added MOST research scientist Jerry Anzalone.

Friesen said someone at the Rochester Institute of Technology is also playing an important role, along with a “huge number” of other people contributing at various levels.

The point, he said, isn’t really for him to be able to make the artificial hands, but to promote the technology so Nicaraguans can make hands for themselves.

To that end, he’s planning on bringing materials for three more printers home with him. He’s also learning to put them together and troubleshoot problems alongside MOST staff, so he can pass that hands-on knowledge to Nicaraguans.

The hands may not officially qualify as prosthetics, which are made by prosthetics professionals and custom-fitted, he said, but they can still change lives in a nation where there are no social services to help amputees, and thousands lost limbs to land mines during and after the Contra War in the ’80s.

“Without a hand, how do you support your family?” he asked.

To learn more about Crear Manos Por Los Ninos, donate or volunteer brainpower, email Friesen at ericjf7@gmail.com.