A little healthy competition

A little competition is good. I mean, I love Makerbot, but they’re not perfect. That’s why I love hearing about other promising business selling 3D printers. Let me lay this down right now. I think the perfect 3D printer will go straight from STL to print, no slicing on a laptop, and be as cheap as possible. Ideally $300 but preferably <$1000. …

Got me some maintenance and upgrades coming up…

It was a good day of printing. Re-stocked my Doctor Who rings and finished my second skull gear. I haven’t posted a “check out the coolness I printed” lately so be sure to check it out there on the right. But after a hard weekend of printing the case fan is not lasting very long, even with oiling. However I’ve …

Picture Perfect Modeling Step-By-Step

I’ve come up with a new technique for modeling real life objects in 3D, a refinement of my previous technique. It won’t work for all objects and may not be perfect yet, but I’ve put together an illustrated guide that will help you use this technique in the future. First you need a thing you want to make. In my …

Ditto printing on Sailfish

So good news. Sailfish has an option under General Options called “Ditto” that when you turn it on runs both extruders at once. So no more running gcode through an exe to do that. The bad news, tho, is if you forget to turn it off… Don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done with it. Congrat to Dan …

Pins now in the store

After the makeSLC presentation I had someone (sorry, I didn’t get your name His name was Kelly AKA “That old guy”) ask me “Why don’t you make pins. I wouldn’t buy a ring or pendant, but I’d use a pin.” Well it’s taken me till now to get them in the store, but here they are. I’m super proud of the …

Cubehero, a promising thingiverse alternative

There are a lot of things about thingiverse I like, not the least of which is all the stuff I’ve designed. PirateBay has a physables section which I won’t link to since their ads aren’t exactly family friendly. There’s Physible Exchange, which rose out of annoyance at Thingiverse’s TOS. And now there’s Cube Hero. It’s based on github which means you …

Dog gonit, they do make them

The very first thing I modeled and one of the first things I printed was a replacement drawer guide for my daughter’s drawer because, I thought, there is no one who would sell that particular piece. This is that particular piece. For sale. So I guess I only managed to save $1.75 with doing that myself. Well, that and the …

3D Printing as a Business – History Repeating Itself

Joseph Chiu wrote this on the makerbot user group and I felt it was worth repeating. As Shawn had mentioned a while back, making money on the print-for-pay is generally not a good return on your investment in time/resources… It’s like photocopiers in the early 1980’s. Back then, there were the big high-end copiers that resembled printing presses.  Then the …

Lazy Halloween Costume

..okay, not that lazy. I mean you need a 3D printer, the Brain Slug design by 7777773 from Thingiverse, sandpaper to take the existing eye off, a googly eye and super glue. But for the amount of work you have to do.the quality is really, really good. I. Recommend. Everyone. Get. A Brain. Slug.