ANN ARBOR, MI - Pete Blanshard has always liked to tinker and make things, spending hours fixing up antique telephones and selling them on eBay. But a table saw accident damaged one of his hands several years ago.

He lost most of his thumb and pinkie finger on his right hand. Suddenly, routine tasks that could have been done in a matter of seconds now took up to 20 minutes to complete.

Blanshard, of Ann Arbor, had a prosthesis made for him by UM, but the hand's shape was not conducive to him being able to pick things up.

A chance encounter with Daniel Dugan while Blanshard was working at Antelope Antiques & Coins, however, has given him optimism that his days in the wood shop are going to be better.

Dugan uses a 3-D printer to help people who have lost parts or all of their hands. He's working with Blanshard on a new thumb and hand prosthesis that is functional, aesthetically pleasing and comfortable.

The two have met on various occasions to work on the thumb at All Hands Active, a makerspace located in downtown Ann Arbor, across the hall from Antelope Antiques & Coins.

"The ability to help people locally with partial hand replacements is an untapped need," Dugan said. "There are probably thousands of people even in the metro Detroit area, who have lost a finger and still have pain related to that. To give them an ability to bend that finger and see that is pain relief and back into a feeling of normalcy (is the goal)."

Blanshard is Dugan's first local recipient of a prosthetic hand, but not the first person to benefit from Dugan's work since he began printing 3-D hands for people in need in 2014.

Dugan became interested in helping others through 3-D printing while serving as a mentor for the Frog Force FIRST Robotics team out of Novi. He noticed a tweet sent out by organizers of Penguicon - a community-run convention for open source software and hardware, science fiction and gaming - requesting help printing 3-D hand kits for those in need.

Dugan and Frog Force got to work assembling 50 hand kits for the convention and they haven't looked back since. Since then, Dugan and members of Frog Force have created more than 200 hands and hand kits through e-NABLE, a national volunteer-run company that creates and gives away free 3-D printed arms and hands to those less fortunate.

Many of the hands and arms made are sent to Haiti, Cuba, Nepal and other countries that are medically underserved, Dugan said.

"I wanted the team to move from trinket printing - we didn't want to print off keychains, we wanted to print functional things," Dugan said.

The cost for materials typically runs between $20 and $50 for a hand and $50 to $150 for an arm.

Dugan estimated he has completed around three dozen fully-assembled hands through his work with e-NABLE, from the standard raptor reloaded model with a pincher grasp, to an electric hand that senses muscle movement to drive the finger movement.

His work with Blanshard has been independent of those efforts, Dugan said, but the concept is the same: to give someone back the functionality they once enjoyed. Blanshard's thumb prosthesis combines the functionality of the Raptor Reloaded model with a more realistic, aesthetically pleasing appearance.

"It is nearly giving someone a new lease on life," Dugan said. "They get to go from a disability that they might have some shame about and are afraid to talk about to a cool, cutting-edge device. Especially in countries that don't have these facilities."

Beyond his mentor work with Frog Force, which ended when he moved from the area in 2015, Dugan is busy at AHA, working on various projects in his spare time. He also has his own 3-D printer at home, where he is running it "20 hours a day, six days a week" to make prosthetics.

While there are still some kinks to work out as Dugan and Blanshard collaborate to create a new hand, Blanshard said he is excited about the possibilities that exist with a 3-D printed hand.

"I am ambidextrous, which is fortunate, and I've been able to train myself to pretty much do everything I did before," he said. "To have the thumb and (use my existing) forefinger, though, would be just unbelievable for me."

Beyond the peace of mind it gives Blanshard to know that he'll be able to complete everyday tasks more efficiently, the new hand also gives him something to look forward to from a looks standpoint.

"Cosmetically it will be nice, because people stare at the hand - it's human nature," he said.

"Just how much it's going to help me," he later added. "It's going to be amazing."