Give an engineer a toy

My day job is full of engineers working on awesome things. Recently they got a 3D printer and they’ve been using it for… everything. Here the printer is in it’s natural environment. Next to it are the build plates. Theoretically they’re one use only but they’ve found ways to extend that, tho it has been found to effect print quality …

So that’s what’s in the box

Pirate 3D released a video that seems to have answered my questions exactly. The first 20 seconds is the interesting points. Looks like their XY gantry is similar to bot-of-the-cloth, but without the cross-over. Interesting this puts all the motors in the same plane, including the Z-Axis. I’m not sure if this is a better or worse than other configurations …

Off the Build Plate

Instead of spreading it out there’s a run down of some of the cool things that have come out of the Makerbot recently: My son designed a Martian with house and rocket ship in Tinkercad a while back and I printed it out for his birthday. I needed to enable supports to do it, but it worked. His reaction when …

Makerbot vs uPrint

My day job has got a uPrint 3D printer by Stratysis which is also a FFF machine like my Replicator, so I decided to print amodel out on both of our machines to see which one looks better. The final judgement is surprisingly neck-and-neck: The uPrint has comparable resolution to the Makerbot, in fact the Makerbot is slightly higher even, but the uPrint has more …

3D printing is close to my heart too.

Between my own project and the news world this has been a very busy week for this blog. Thank you for reading.Of course everyone is excited about the baby that Doctors made a 3D printed stint for and saved his life. It’s awesome, it’s 3D printing, and it’s a baby, all the making of a good story.But lest we forget …

Now that’s a proper Bauhaus set

I don’t know why but the version of the Bauhaus set where everything is more cubical always appealed to me more. Fortunately TeamTeamUSA on thingiverse made one that only had a few small problems, like the knight not being printable without supports and the queen being a work in progress. So fixed up these two problems and printed my own out …

Everything you want, lubed with snake oil

Step right up folks! See a 3D printer that can print in full color! Get prints so flawless that you don’t even need to see them only $400! How about a 3D printer without the printer for a measly $75? Get the most of of your 3D printer with these special, never before seen plans! All this and more can be yours! Each order comes …

Kickstarting what’s already free

I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. Working on the weekends and lunch hours, putting my models up for free when what I really should have been doing is KickStarting basic modeling projects. Never mind that this has already been done over 400 times, and in many cases better and more comprehensive. Plus every single one of those use …

Printing a music box

Wizard123’s Music Box on Thingiverse is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a while… if it works. I printed up the SMB one in ABS first and the results were not encouraging. The construction was genius, there’s a hole to make putting the first gear in place easier and the rest go in well enough with a …

Coloring filament with Markers

Way back in the day (like, maybe 2 years ago) when filament color selection was scarce 3D printers would color their filament with a marker on the incoming filament. Clever contraptions were constructed to color the filament sufficently. Since I’ve had a hard time finding a semi-transparent purple PLA filament for a project Idea I have I decided to try …