We love 3D printing. We’ll print brackets, brackets for brackets, and brackets to hold other brackets in place. Perhaps even a guilty-pleasure Benchy. But 3D printed shoes? That’s where we start to have questions.
Every few months, someone announces a new line of 3D-printed footwear. Do you really want your next pair of sneakers to come out of a nozzle? Most of the shoes are either limited editions or fail to become very popular.
First World Problem
You might be thinking, “Really? Is this a problem that 3D printing is uniquely situated to solve?” You might assume that this is just some funny designs on some of the 3D model download sites. But no. Adidas, Nike, and Puma have shoes that are at least partially 3D printed. We have to ask why.
We are pretty happy with our shoes just the way that they are. But we will admit, if you insist on getting a perfect fitting shoe, maybe having a scan of your foot and a custom or semi-custom shoe printed is a good idea. Zellerfield lets you scan your feet with your phone, for example. [Stefan] at CNC Kitchen had a look at those in a recent video. The company is also in many partnerships, so when you hear that Hugo Boss, Mallet London, and Sean Watherspoon have a 3D-printed shoe, it might actually be their design from Zellerfield.
Or, try a Vivobiome sandal. We aren’t sold on the idea that we can’t buy shoes off the rack, but custom fits might make a little sense. We aren’t sure about 3D-printed bras, though.
Maybe the appeal of 3D-printed shoes lies in their personalizability? Creating self-printed shoes might make sense, so you can change their appearance or otherwise customize them. Maybe you’d experiment with different materials, colors, or subtle changes in designs. Nothing like 30 hours of printing and three filament changes to make one shoe. And that doesn’t explain why the majors are doing it.
Think of the Environment!
There is one possible plus to printing shoes. According to industry sources, more than 20 billion pairs of shoes are made every year, and almost all will end up in landfills. Up to 20% of these shoes will go straight to the dump without being worn even once.
So maybe you could argue that making shoes on demand would help reduce waste. We know of some shoe companies that offer you a discount if you send in an old pair for recycling, although we don’t know if they use them to make new shoes or not. Your tolerance for how much you are willing to pay might correlate to how much of a problem you think trash shoes really are.
But mass-market 3D-printed shoes? What’s the appeal? If you’re desperate for status, consider grabbing a pair of 3D-printed Gucci shoes for around $1,300. But for most of us, are you planning on dropping a few bucks on a pair of 3D-printed shoes? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.
If you are imagining the big guys printing shoes on an Ender 3, that’s probably not the case. The shoes we’ve seen are made on big commercial printers.
the obvious practical thing is 3d-printed insoles. that’s typically how shoes are customized to your feet, just replacing the insole. most feet will fit fine within a standard outer sole and upper.
a podiatrist will charge around $1k for custom insoles, and there’s an abundance of resources now that will do it for less…a lot of them send you a box of some sort of like modeling clay that you use to make a cast of your foot, and then they send you a custom insole. a very common activity and i definitely do have some interest in skipping the middle men for that… i wouldn’t print the insole, of course…i would print the mold.
As someone who has used orthotic insoles since a child and doesn’t really have the money to put insolea in all my shoes, you are right on the money with your comment.
But why? If you print the insole not only is ot easier but you can have different spots with differing cushioning etc. They don’t have to live forever if you can just print a new one for $2 or w/e
because intuitively i expect it will be easier to find a castable resin with a good ‘squishiness’ than to fine tune TPU or some other exotic filament…but i haven’t tried either yet! :)
The insoles I buy from the store already do that by varying the thickness of the foam rubber they’re made of. Sure, it makes the insole “lumpy” but those lumps compress down to size under your foot.
Our bodies are all different, some subtly, some not so subtly; thinking that we should be able to fit into industry standard clothes is backasswards, and also entirely modern.
Anything that can take us back to custom fitting clothes and shoes is good. I’d happily wear a custom made 3D printed bra, although the ones in that Nike advert seem to have forgotten the 3rd dimension of 3D printing, they’d need to solve that first.
I’d really like to see custom cut and stitched clothes based on 3D scans, so a designer could design how they want their clothes to fit, hang, cinch, etc. and a computer program could translate that onto any given body.
I read an essay, I think it was in The New Yorker, about a couple of physicists who decided to revolutionize bra manufacturing and design a bra that would be a good comfortable fit for anyone, and they spent a couple years working on it, started a company, got some investor money, and finally concluded that it was more or less impossible for any small number of standard designs to be universally comfortable because the solution space was just too large. The only way to solve it was with more or less individual, customized designs. It was definitely one of those “bright guys think they can easily solve a problem because they vastly underestimate its complexity” stories.
No, that’s just physicists thinking everything they don’t understand is easy.
Very typical.
Like a couple of seamstresses going into fusion power.
The problem they had was ‘anyone’.
As you say, crazy edge cases.
That and they were likely both men, only one needed a bra.
I was once talking shit about the price of women’s swimwear.
Had worked out the price pre square inch of nylon…
Was challenged to ‘If it’s so easy, make me a bikini’.
She wouldn’t even try it on!
Who knew dental floss and clingwrap were bad material choices?
seems like they should have gone in with the awareness that they were going to be making a process for producing custom bras, rather than expecting to beat the status quo at its own game
“Anything that can take us back to custom fitting clothes and shoes is good. ”
Guts the resale market. It’s like every purchase will be a customized “choose your adventure” done in rhyme or haiku.
“guts the resale market”
Not really, Unless the individual an item is originally produced for is significantly outside the statistical norm there will always be a segment of the general population within the “goldilocks zone” of resale and reuse.
Additionally, there exists the potential for recustomization if the designer creates multicomponent constructions. To stay with the given example, a 3d printed shoe with a separate 3d printed insole would allow anyone whose foot fit the shell to have their own custom insoles fit to make them their own…..though I guess that would be more of a “Cinderella zone” than goldilocks.
PS Tailored suits are custom fit clothes, and a tailor can adjust their fit to your changing waistline, or a change in ownership. Ebay is full of EXPENSIVE suits that can be bought for a small fraction of their original price. You can wear them as they are, basically turning someone elses bespoke suit into one that will fit you no worse than an off the rack option, or you can spend a little extra and have a tailor adjust it to fit you perfectly.
So in this case, bespoke not only does not kill resale, but it supports a service industry as well.
Several concerns: the often heard benefit of less waste seems more like a myst. Looking on actual recycling rates for plastic is disillusionel at best. Here in germany the average rate over all plastics is 12%. So a niche product like printed shoes will be sorted from the waste an recycled to a high number – i doubt.
According to steffans video, all pva support is rinsed down the drain, mentioning that the waste water company is not sure how their facilities deal with all the microplastics. Last time i checked we defenatly need more plastic in every water source – for reasons…
Microplastic caused by weardown of the outer sole. For most shoes nower days have plastic soles, therefore produce microplastic, but you can make them from natural rubbers and kork – truly biodegradable.
Food climate- you eather get some sort of sandal, or you have your feet hole day long in an expensive plastic bag. Please warn me before taking them of.
Unless we talk about orthopedic insoles or shoes, for me it is big bullshit for people who have to much.
Not to mention that the “recycling” that happens isn’t recycling but downcycling – turning the waste into inferior products, such as PET plastic bottles into low quality disposable T-shirts. Paper ends up as cardboard, glass ends up as fiber insulation, concrete as aggregate for road fill etc. Metals are perhaps the only things we can effectively recycle. This makes the waste chain longer, but the material still ends up in a landfill or an incinerator and the original problem of having to source virgin materials remains.
The plastics recycling infrastructure has the problem of degradation, contamination and mixing, which makes the recycled material inferior to new material. No economically viable process exists yet to deconstruct and re-construct polymers up to original quality.
After the shoe has been worn, the plastic will be embedded with dirt and loaded up with water and oils. The polymer chains will have shortened by mechanical and UV/chemical damage. You simply cannot grind it up and put it back through the printer because it is no longer the same plastic.
You don’t recycle plastic as plastic.
You go another step and recycle it into fuel.
It’s just accounting, but try and explain that to a greenie.
They are not smart people.
recycling plastic as fuel is another downgrade path: used fuel is CO2, NOx, etc. which are dumped into the atmosphere.
PS: try and explain that to a ‘green basher’
Turning trash plastic into fuel is an upgrade.
You burn it hot, with gas, as clean as anything.
You prefer to waste resources sorting plastic, then landfilling most while burning new fuel?
Even if you work the math in CO2, just burning trash plastic as fuel is a net win.
You don’t even need to sort it, lots of trash incinerates well for power.
Just machine sort by density.
Keep the scrap metal and rocks out of incinerator.
It’s not exactly high quality fuel. Plastic waste as fuel is like the land-based equivalent of bunker oil, including the sulfur if you have vulcanized rubber in the mix.
I’d much prefer the petroleum it was made from for fuel purposes.
PVA biodegrades readily, doesn’t even need industrial composting or anything fancy. It also breaks down in the human body readily and is used for implants and pills for that reason. It’s the main component of Elmer’s glue. Don’t assume polymer equals microplastics and environmental issues. PVA, Cellophane, and PHA are compostable even at home. PLA breaks down in the human body and has medical grades for that reason, and is also made from bacteria not from petroleum.
Shoes only last 300-500 miles before the soles are worn flat and the seams start to unravel, and they’re more trouble than they’re worth to repair (essentially rebuilding the entire shoe), which means I go through a pair every year. It doesn’t make sense to buy very expensive shoes because they wear out just the same, so I go for the value option. Of course you could wear army boots or similar, but those too turn ratty after a while, and they’re not very comfortable for walking.
Now the trouble is, whenever I find a nice comfortable and good looking pair of shoes, the model goes out of production next year and I have to spend an inordinate amount of time shopping around to find the next good pair. Once or twice I’ve had the luck of finding the same shoe online, but mostly not.
However, if you could 3D print the shoe then you’ll always be able to reproduce it and not rely on the fashion trends folding back to the same idea.
Combat boots, or really any leather shoes/boots only get ratty if you dont take care of them.
I have a pair of CBs thats 20 years old, that looks no older than my kids 5 year old pair. I polish them every 4-6 weeks, and then every 3-6 months I strip them, condition the leather, and apply fresh polish.
The tread wears down over time, but with good quality vulcanized sole combat boots you can retread them. I typically get between 3-7 years out of a retreading depending on my weight, activity level, and how much of my foot travel is on cement/asphalt vs nature.
Its a few hours work spread over a couple of days. First I grind the sole flat, clean well, and prime with blue maxibond cement, then use PANGIT A & B COMPOUND (typically used for industrial belt repair) to build them back up to thickness. Let them sit and chemically vulcanize for a couple of days then use a hot knife with a Π channel blade to recreate the original Panama tread.
They get scuffed and dinged up when you kick icy snow, gravel and tree roots etc. outdoors. You can fill the cracks and pits in the leather with shoe polish, but it doesn’t last very long. I had a pair that lasted almost ten years with regular buffing, but in the end the soles split in half all the way through in the winter because the rubber got brittle from age. My new leather boots have a seam in the exact spot where the tip of the shoe bends, so it’s tearing the stitching apart after only one winter.
They’re fine if you just walk around, but leather shoes a bit too heavy and hot for my taste. Aside for winter, I need lighter softer shoes that can breathe, and it’s those that I have to replace every year because they get more and heavier mileage than my winter boots.
Vulcanized rubber only splits if you neglect proper maintenance, Meguiars rubber conditioner is your friend. Also, There was probably cracking long before the sole split through. If your keeping the rubber well conditioned and you start getting cracking along flex lines, Thats In the arena of resoling, You grind a channel about 1/4 inch beyond both sides of the flexpoint to half the depth of the rubber, clean well, prime with blue maxibond, lay a thin layer of Pangit, a mesh of reinforcing fibers across the flexline, then a topcoat of pangit a bit higher than flush with the surrounding rubber, Let cure, and grind flat.
Your seam issue is bad boot design. Mine have no seam until the upper joins the lowers, Thats a full overlapping quad stitch. Then theres a seam where the heel panel joins the upper, also an overlapping quad stitch. The upper is solid and continuous without internal seams. The heel panel is a second layer reinforcement. You could swap it if you needed to, its the most likely place to take significant damage, Unless youre a toe dragger, which Im not.
I mostly wear my combat boots because tennis shoes, regardless of price, seem to fall apart and fall off my feet after only a few short months. Ive had very little issue with my combat boots scuffing at any significant depth, but they arent cheaply made half nylon with low grade leather lowers. The few scuffs I have had buffed out with fine sand paper during a strip/polish session. Ive worn them hunting in the mountains of colorado, the swamps of lousiana, and the deserts of arizona and california on plenty of rough ground.
Really the only time I dont rely on them is when its a fancy event, or when Im doing shop work that necessitates a steel/composite toed alternative. If McRae (the only manufacturer still producing a panama sole with an all leather upper in black) would release a composite toe version Id probably move on to a new pair, but barring that, Ill keep taking care of my old boots.
They were made of natural rubber. I tried but I couldn’t find any reasonable procedure to fix them back together without grinding off the whole sole and stitching in new bottoms.
The way it went, the weather went down to -30 C and below that winter and the soles just snapped in half while I was walking to work.
-20C? yeah that isnt great for any boot, nor any body.
In any case, unless the entire sole was dry rotted from neglect, the procedure outlined above would apply even if the split was clean through.
When I was in my twenties I worked a minesite in the yukon a few summers. Thats where I learned to use belt repair compounds to retread my boots. But its also where I learned that a dozer tire costs $4k+. When you blow a $4k tire, you dont throw it out if you can avoid it. You repair it.
https://youtu.be/zBHhzznlcec?si=WVLIjOJ0Ukmok15X
You certainly arent putting greater load on your boots than that. Vulcanized rubber is repairable, you just didnt know what you were doing.
Most tire repair materials are around shore 40A, Mil spec for a combot boot sole is Shore 60A ±5 Pangit cures to a Shore 55-60A so its pretty much an ideal solution IMO.
-20C is nothing. At -30 C I have to start putting gun oil on my bicycle chains so they wouldn’t freeze up.
Both ways!
Luxury!
Tell that to kids today, and they won’t believe you.
Rethread. Reminded of an article about shoes made from old tires. Cheap shoes for when tariffs come a calling.
Back in the olden days of the 1970’s, and probably before then, there were lots of sandals (hippies were everywhere!) with soles made out of a patch of tread cut from a used tire (that is shoe soles, not hippie souls).
I’m wildly guessing those sandals went away as steel belted radial tires became the norm. Those steel belts are some tough stuff to cut. Ya ain’t a gunna whittle out a setta sandal soles with your daily driver Tom Mix pocket knife.
They came back for a second about 5 years ago.
The kids thought they had invented it, same as oral sex.
Bandsaws to cut the tires into sandals is assumed. Belts are just cut.
In my experience, stomping through snow in the late winter is especially destructive to leather boots, because it has multiple ice layers from repeated melting and freezing and snowing. It’s like kicking through a stack of razor blades – it scratches and cuts the leather.
Where the leather gets cut with a long deep scratch, it starts to fold outwards, and you can’t polish that out. Applying rubber cement kinda-sorta works to close the gash, but the shell tension is lost and it will open up as you walk.
Strange, I stomp with the rubber soles, not the leather top of my boot. Ive never had razor ice cut my boots, Maybe colorado snow is different than wherever you live. Dunno. Ive never used it on boots but Ive had good luck repairing car/motorcycle leather with Angelus Leather Filler, youd certainly get better results than rubber cement.
Stomping is perhaps the wrong word – wading or shoving snow away with your shoes is when they get cut the most. Also, when I have to kick off that block of ice that has packed in the wheel well of my car and then dropped down and frozen solid onto the ground behind the wheel. Miss and you end up slicing the side of the shoe on a jagged icicle.
I read that in Colorado you may get 4 feet of snow in three days. We don’t get big blizzards but frequent small snowfalls maybe and inch or three at a time, which then melt and compact into crusty layers. Dozens of layers by the end of the winter. Last winter we had a big warm spell in January which put a solid layer of ice on the snow, and then more rained on top. By the end of the winter you could walk on the snow, stomp a hole and stand on the ice shelf half way through, then stomp again and fall to the ground. If you’re kicking the snow to clear a spot for a fire, you end up kicking that ice sheet side on.
That said, the winter boots the army uses here are not leather but vulcanized rubber with felt lining.
haha i was going to say, the reason to buy expensive shoes is that some brands of expensive shoes make the same shoe year after year. new balance has a couple repeatable lines, and the saucony i’m wearing has been “mostly” the same for 5 years now.
a random anecdote…i tried to calculate the mileage for shoes, and overall it doesn’t seem to be the best measure for me. i’ve had some abrupt lifestyle changes, where i’m doing 600 miles a year and other times when i’m doing closer to 200…and it doesn’t seem to matter much, my shoes last about a year either way.
gait also has a huge impact
gait and WEIGHT.
Im currently a respectable, for my height, 197#(89kg)
15 years ago I peaked at 320#(145kg).
My soles wear down much slower now than then, and from the feels, so do my knees.
I had one nice pair of expensive shoes that lasted for years, made by a French brand, but when I got around to buy the second pair… they had changed the design on that model of shoe. It was almost the same, but they had made it worse with less padding, thinner leather and a slightly different cut pattern, and the new pair didn’t last.
I personally wouldn’t likely wear 3d printed shoes but there certainly is a place for printed inserts….
About 10 years ago a local tech school student had me come out and help him with getting the 3d printer to print in flexible filament so he could print an insert that went into the end of a shoe for a girl who lost part of her foot (IIRC, lost some toes and part of the end due to a lawn mower accident).
I can see this being useful for testing fit…if not long term use.
^^^^^ this, but perhaps 1,000 miles MTBF
Have a pair of very comfy dress shoes and combat boots courtesy Uncle Sugar and the Vietnam war. Still good, but worn seldom for the last 50 years.
Would kill for home printed arch supports that fit well, issue is scanning under load and figuring out how to correct for that, probably blow through a dozen spools making it work
^^^^^ this, but perhaps 1,000 miles MTBF
Have a pair of very comfy dress shoes and combat boots courtesy Uncle Sugar and the Vietnam war. Still good, but worn seldom for the last 50 years.
Would kill for home printed arch supports that fit well, issue is scanning under load and figuring out how to correct for that, probably blow through a dozen spools making it work
Several concerns: the often heard benefit of less waste seems more like a myst. Looking on actual recycling rates for plastic is disillusionel at best. Here in germany the average rate over all plastics is 12%. So a niche product like printed shoes will be sorted from the waste an recycled to a high number – i doubt.
According to steffans video, all pva support is rinsed down the drain, mentioning that the waste water company is not sure how their facilities deal with all the microplastics. Last time i checked we defenatly need more plastic in every water source – for reasons…
Microplastic caused by weardown of the outer sole. For most shoes nower days have plastic soles, therefore produce microplastic, but you can make them from natural rubbers and kork – truly biodegradable.
Food climate- you eather get some sort of sandal, or you have your feet hole day long in an expensive plastic bag. Please warn me before taking them of.
Unless we talk about orthopedic insoles or shoes, for me it is big bullshit for people who have to much.
Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) does not contribute to microplastic pollution. Unlike traditional plastics, PVA is water-soluble and readily biodegradable in wastewater treatment facilities and natural aquatic environments. It breaks down into harmless substances, such as carbon dioxide and water, rather than forming persistent microplastic particles
The few 3D printed shoes I’ve seen (online) look kinda crappy and impractical. Based on the efforts I’ve seen to create cushioning, I’d have said that 3D printed shoes weren’t really practical. That open meshy looking stuff might work but, nah. Then I saw foaming TPU used to make bicycle handle grips (I think it was Functional Print Friday on Youtube).
With variable density possible in a single print, if that stuff holds up then there might actually be a way to print a useful shoe. Especially for growing children, as they tend to do if you keep feeding them, I could totally see printing one piece “flip-flops” for convenience if not thrift. (I’m so old that they were called “thongs” when I was a kid. I’m not getting into a conversation about 3D printed thongs nowadays).
And, hey, a lot of people do wear Crocs and the umpteen knockoffs thereof. There’s no accounting for taste and the market often conflicts with my sensibilities. Though the Crocs and clones, don’t look pretty, they do look pretty printable given the right material.
That said, I just got a 3D printer yesterday and I assure you that shoes are pretty near the bottom of the list of things I’m interested in printing. But, “the internet is just a fad” tells me that I could very well be missing the boat. I suppose there’s some bit of symmetry to that since a Benchy is below the bottom of my list of things to print.
Where I am, it’s impossible not to feed them to avoid them growing. Also, it’s almost impossible to find a pair of summer shoes for my son, his size (36 EU) is just not produced. You can find (28-35) fine everywhere (kid sizes), and (38-45) everywhere too (adult size). But in between, it seems like there’s a black hole in designers mind, or they have all failed their math exams somehow.
Yet, for the only chinese crap shoes you could find, they’ll last weeks (yes weeks, not months, not even years). They are all glued. The sole is hollow (so the glue should stick to a sub-mm edge of plastic). The price is the same whatever the quality, since it’s the price you can afford to pay, not the cost of the item.
In that case, a 3D printed shoe would be a god bless here. Even a mixed material shoes (like a 3D printed sole and a leather band on top). I have shoe’s specific thread so I can thread them and repair them when required. Just missing is the model.
Had a pair of gripfast uk boots. Tanker/leather buckle lacing option under, screwed on soles. Steel toe etc.
Got lost in a move after 20 years intermittent use.
But the interesting thing was they were default warrantied for a century, with the proviso that they’d be return and replace even if one had done the equivalent damage to boiling them for emergency rations.
Most stuff is cheap made, high priced, engineering in all the wrong places to spend disposable garbage.
Being able to pop off fit customizations or an emergency replacement is about where things are now, and direct to consumer or mass produced printed shoes is almost certainly companies seeking ways to cut costs(workers), reuse prototyping etc gear otherwise underutilized, and extend profits( limited edition price gouges).
i think people are focusing on the wrong thing, instead of making 3D printed shoes for mass production, instead they should be made custom and on-demand, this is the kind of production 3D printing is made for, trying to make mass produced shoes using 3D printing is just using the wrong tool for the job
So, Gucci wants $1300 for a 3d printed shoe and they won’t even scan your foot and adjust the design to fit.
So many things here are “how to increase waste 50x through a really misguided attempt to reduce already ridiculous amounts of waste, but do it in a way that makes me feel cool and futuristic”
Given how clothing manufacturers seemingly can’t even operate a tape measure it would be great to have a basic 3D scan of your body and be able to order clothes that were manufactured to actually fit.
Right now this all smacks of gimmicks for PR rather than really practical stuff, although there’s been some very good suggestions in the comments such as just printing a basic insert for otherwise normal shoes to make them fit perfectly.
Unless you are looking for tightly conforming rigid armor, a 3d scan is probably overkill. An hour with a tailor and a tape measurer will get you a perfectly filled out measurement sheet that any number of “made to measure” garment makers can use to create whatever youre after.
I have a cousin who is 7’2″(218cm) tall, 300#(136kg). At 16 he broke 6’7″(200cm) and has pretty much had to have all of his clothes made to measure since. For 12 years he had a woman in his hometown sew all his clothes for him, but she passed just before the pandemic.
He had a few hits and misses with online made to measure companies but seems to have found the right fit for him. He says he’s actually paying less now then he used to, and we all agree that the companies he is using now are producing much better fitting and more stylish clothes than he used to wear despite them working off a measurement sheet. He’s also really happy to NOT have to stand around having fabric draped and pinned anymore.
My daughter is a thrift store fiend. Shes been doing her own alterations since high school. She even sent a few sketches and measurement sheets off to dressmakers for her prom dress and got really pretty results much cheaper than she was quoted locally. In 2019 she bought a perpetual license for Marvelous designer to do 3d character clothing design before it went subscription only. She has had several people who have bought virtual garments ask her about making custom clothes and recently shes been considering getting a subscription to MDs sister program CLO3D which supports pattern making and export so she can try doing some custom pieces for herself and maybe etsy if it works out well.
I think when most of us are talking about a 3D scan we’re talking about the kind you get with a smartphone, not the kind you need to go to a place to get. Those kinds of scans (and the right application) should be able to pop out all the measurements a tailor needs automatically.
Proprietary AR tryons, where clothing is size adapted from a smartphones camera feed exist, so youre not wrong, but a measurement sheet from a tailor works for anyone who alters or constructs garments around the world without tech that most in that industry havent yet adopted, so even if an open source app existed you would still be seriously limited in your options.