I haven’t been reporting much on cool things that I’m printing because my Bot has mostly been occupied with making chess sets and restocking the store. I’m kind of determined to run out 4 rolls of filament, one white, one red, and two black, printing as many chess sets as I can out of them. However today I discovered that …
The problem with “Can anyone print this for me”
A common cry of those just outside the 3D printing community, and from many within, is that there needs to be a service where people can request something made by those with 3D printers. Well, now there are communities like Makzurie filling that gap. But twice this week alone I’ve seen the same story played out twice in different places. …
3D Printing Tidbit – PLA and Canola Oil
Personally I don’t use PLA, but this was just too weird not to share. According to the Makerbot Google Group if you put a little drop of canola oil on the tip of your PLA before you load it you have less problems printing. If you don’t remember PLA can be (and often is) made with corn starch. I think PLA …
Durability test complete
7 months ago I made thebluedirt’s airport proof buckle, wove a belt out of 50 feet para cord for it and have been wearing it for about 6 months almost every day. Late last week it broke. On the bottom where the hole for the hinge is closest to the wall gave and the buckle fell out. I’m going to …
3D Printing Tidbit – Shells are important
Okay, lesson learned. There is a reason why shells is one of the options on print-o-matic. Shells are as important to successful prints as filament diameter. I was having a terrible time printing stacking bins without cracking. I moved the Replicator somewhere warmer, slowed the print down, sped it up, increased printing temp, lowered it, all to no effect. Finally …
Shapesmith
Shapesmith. I have been wanting something I could recommend to people as heartily as I recommended Tinkercad before they went subscription based. Is Shapesmith that service? No. But it could be. Shapesmith is in early beta at the moment and is better suited for the draftsman than the tinkerer because it’s going to take a little while running through the tutorials before you’ll be able …
Win an Up! 3D printer
Up! makes themselves a pretty good 3D printer. If you don’t already have one but you do have some project you’d like to show off the post it on Instructables and you might win and Up! 3D printer.
Enhancing the game
In case you’re not following my profile on Thingiverse, I uploaded a minor remix (because we’re not calling them derivatives any more I guess) this morning for a treasure chest with a lid. The modification I made really was extremely minor, just some vertex editing in Blender, but I wanted to use this excuse to talk about Heroica, since that’s what the …
Why is 3D printing rising so fast, really?
Through Makurze I found this article that asks the question “Why is 3D printing rising so fast?” The article does a good job of explaining the history of 3D printing to this point, but it doesn’t answering the question it asks very well in my opinion. The article suggests that the rise of 3D printing is “just because it is …
Makurze, pimping your printer
So after ProtoExchange I was told about Makurze.com, a message board offering a similar service. That’s about it. There’s not much there yet but if you’re looking to get in on the ground floor of a new online maker community head on over to Makurze.com and sign up, then offer your 3D printer or request someone to print or design …