SALT LAKE CITY — Sometimes when engineer Nicco Macintyre talks about 3-D printing, it sounds like science fiction.

“This is the technology that will eventually develop into that ‘give me a cup of Earl Grey’ — that machine that you just tell it what you want and it makes whatever,” Macintyre said, referring to the fictional replicator that produces tea out of thin air for Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Piccard.

“We can do the cup now,” he said. “The tea might take a little longer.”

He can print the cup at his Salt Lake company, Zeni Kinetic, which is gearing up to manufacture and sell 3-D printers.

For decades, the prototype engineer and technician has used 3-D printing — then called rapid prototyping — to build parts for industrial robotics. A few years ago, patents for the technology began expiring.

“I started seeing the open source community chatter talking about this,” Macintyre said. “The expired patents … (are) what sparked it, but it was the development by the open-source community that made it all happen.”

Macintyre began building printers and manufacturing plastic filament — the material many machines print with — and this fall opened a shop on State Street to sell his new Origin printer.

Most of the parts of the Origin prototype were 3-D printed. In other words, he 3-D printed a 3-D printer.

“This is how we build things now,” Macintyre said.

Macintyre rattled off a list of applications — from NASA’s 3-D-printed rocket injector, to a $50,000 prosthetic hand printed for about $50, to 3-D printed chocolates and 3-D printed homes.

“You can make whatever you want. You can download it from the Internet, change it around a little bit to make it suit your purpose, (and) print it out … immediately,” Macintyre said.

Garrett Peterson, of Layton, has a thumb-size, custom-designed 3-D-printed piece of plastic that saved his life. The now 2-year-old was born without a pulmonary valve, a condition that put pressure on his airway and often caused it to collapse.

“His airways were really floppy,” said his mother, Natalie Peterson. “They kind of describe it like a wet noodle.”

C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, designed and printed two biodegradable plastic splints and sewed them around Garrett's bronchi. Once a little boy with an uncertain future, and tied to a respirator 24-7, he can now breathe on his own.

“Yes, we love hearing the sound of his breathing,” Peterson said.

“It’s so nice to be able to hear you breathe," she said to her son, "and I know that you're doing all that work on your own.”

Related:

3-D printer saves toddler struggling to breathe

When Garrett Peterson was born, nurses couldn't rotate his head from side to side. Doing so made him turn blue instantly. But a splint created on a 3-D printer saved his life.

As Garrett’s parents played with him on the living room rug, a smile emerged. That’s something relatively new.

“We got home (from the hospital) on April 1,” said his dad, Jacob Peterson. “We kind of think that's his birthdate because that's when his physical development can start to recover. He could actually start to live this life. Before that he was just trying to breathe. It was taking all his energy, all his resources were going to that.”

Being able to do 3-D printing will change the way the world makes things. Right now, “everything’s made in China, Japan and Asia somewhere, Mexico, and then shipped over the world,” Macintyre said. “Some things are shipped back and forth three or four times.”

For decades, Macintyre said, the world’s been moving towards a centralized manufacturing economy, and 3-D printing will reverse that.

“This technology is going to democratize manufacturing,” he said. “It’s gonna change everything."

For Garrett Peterson, it already has.

“We just feel so grateful that we’re able to have Garrett in our lives,” Peterson said, “and we just feel so grateful for the doctors … and how technology has just hit the exact same time Garret needed it, has come into play, been able to save his life.”

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