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 …
Don’t fear the update tutorial video
There are some people who are afraid to update their makerbot firmware. It’s really not that bad. Sorry about the crappy and dark video, but I just wanted to show what it was like. The take away’s from this are: Don’t leave your bot plugged into the USB when its turned off, it can ruin the board. When the update …
Afinia Gold ABS Filament Review
I decided to try out Afinia’s value line filament and tried a spool of gold ABS because if it turns out looking good I’ve got a number of cool ideas I can use for that. In the end I have nothing but good things to say about Afinia’s filament, the gold doesn’t get a gold star. First the good: For cheap …
Printing somewhere warmer
Like I said, it’s cold right now. It’s painful to be in the garage with my Makerbot. That can’t be good for it. So in an attempt to see how bad printing in the cold, is I needed a control situation, and to show off a bit I brought my bot to work. Durring the day I printed a spool …