Topic: Thank you to the Filastruder team
Hello friends,
I want to sincerely thank the Filastruder team for their help and kindness in getting our lonely filastruder up and working in Gaza.
In short, it is impossible to get pre-made filament here, though ground / recycled ABS is relatively plentiful and the occasional virgin bag of plastic can be had when the southern border with Egypt permits it. As such, all of our 3D printing depends on this one very hardworking filastruder that has been pulling plastic for the past few years.
Unfortunately, a combination of normal wear and tear and a few mistakes caused some of the gears to go bad. We tried to print replacements from ABS, but none worked:
I ordered a bunch of gears with the hopes of never having to worry about this again, and when the Filastruder team picked this up, they were genuinely curious about what we were doing. As we explained, we are a group who is working on Free/Open source medical devices, such as a research-validated stethoscope that we are producing in quantity for use by doctors here. Our current development work is on trauma tourniquets, pulse oximeters and electrocardiograms.
Having heard this, the Filastruder team (special shout out to Tim) donated the gears, which we've finally managed to replace! Exciting since we are now fully back in action!!
So thank you to all of you as a community for being so wonderful, and to the Filastruder team for their continued work on this.
With love from Gaza,
the Glia team (Tarek, Shaker, Mahmoud and Mohammed)