You havenʼt seen 3-D, until youʼve seen Loganʼs 3-D
BY GINNA YOUNG,
COURIER SENTINEL
Entrepreneurship runs in the family for Logan LaNou, who, at just 15 years of age, already is operating his own business. The Cadott youth started Logan’s 3-D Creations last year, and business boomed so much, he now has a “storefront” location in the family’s fireworks store.
Logan’s fascination with 3-D printing began when his tech instructor showed him a now obsolete and much slower printer.
“I thought it was the coolest thing, just to sit there and watch it print,” said Logan. “I thought it was amazing how it could be that precise, with just belts and metal.”
Seeing how that affected him, Logan’s dad, Cory, got him a printer for Christmas. At first, Logan printed up about 20 little lizards to have on hand when the summer selling season began at the store, not knowing if the lightweight creatures would be a hit.
“I sold them all in the first hour,” said Logan. “That was really fun, so I bought four printers.”
Since then, Logan has visited local farmers markets and craft shows, and set up a website (logans3dcreations.com) for people to purchase directly from there.
“I thought it was cool that people in Washington, were buying from little old me,” said Logan.
Logan purchases some of the high-quality filament from Bambu Labs, where he gets his printers, as well as filament from Amazon. The filament, which is a plastic cord-like material, is fed into essentially a hot glue gun, layering the filament over and over, to make a design at a rapid speed, complete with movable joints.
While he can print multi-colored items, it takes an incredibly long time to do so and the more colors there are in the design, the longer it takes. It also costs a bit more, but Logan welcomes suggestions on designs and questions about how he makes the 3-D items.
Copyright is one issue Logan has to overcome, as someone may request an item that legally cannot be made, outside of the copyright holder. That’s why many of Logan’s de- Continued on page 16
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GINNA YOUNG/COURIER SENTINEL 3-D creations
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signs are unique, in the fact that he purchases them from creators on Etsy or Fiverr.
“You gotta be really careful with it,” said Logan. Included in the creations, are dinosaurs, narwals, axolotls, turtles, dragons, alligators, sharks, wolves, woolly mammoths, swords, tiaras – pretty much anything one can imagine. Logan has even started printing 3-D pictures and cookie cutters.
“You ought to see the computer work he has to do to make these things work,” said Cory. “There’s a tremendous amount of computer software behind this.”
When he gets a request of, “Hey, make me a 5-inch dinosaur,” Logan has to take a minute before saying, sure, “I can do that,” as he’s figuring what that measurement is in millimeters. If that doesn’t work, Google is his best friend.
“Everything’s in millimeters, as far as 3-D printing,” said Logan.
Some requests are a little more complicated, like parts for a tractor. To help honor those requests for prototypes, Logan bought a 3-D scanner, so his 3-D print is an exact replica.
Lately, he’s even had requests to teach classes on using a 3-D printer and could get into repair of the printers.
“It’s a super fun thing to dabble in.”
