Andrew Mazzotta approached me with the possibility of creating a test object similar to, well, lots of test objects out there already, with a little indirect marketing towards his 3DHacker website. The thing about creating a test object, particularly a comprehensive one, is you have to decide who your audience is, what do they want to test and what can the …
Challenge Accepte..ugh.
DesignMakeTeach issued the challenge and I rose to answer it… sort of. To be fair, I already knew I was going to have problems with the overhangs. Overhang issue aside this, I think, is the best way to print this object. All overhangs become gradual slopes with few exceptions, and the majority doesn’t even need the supports. You don’t need …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Fixing the Support Issue
So after my last adventures trying to get supports to work on round objects I appealed to the Makebot user’s group and got back the response that I should probably focus on bridging and finding out the lowest temperature I can print at. So I did and I didn’t take any good pictures of the process but I’m still fiddling at something …
Making a hose spike
When putting down the watering system for the garden this year we needed something to hold the hose down. Sure, we could just use a piece of bent wire, but that idea literally did not cross my mind until I had designed, printed, and tested a solution, and only then when my wife suggested that we could just use wire. …
Cute Dancing Robot from RoboBrrd
Thanks to writing buddy of mine Devin Watson to bringing this to my attention, here’s a fun 3D printing and electronics project that makes a fun toy for the kids. Buddy 4000 is a 3D printed robot with electronics and servos embedded to make it dance. Instructions are available on Robobrrd and they’ll even sell you the printed chassis sans the electronics …
So far so good
I hope I’m not jinxing it but my latest round of repairs seems to be doing their job well, well aside from the bad skin issue on large object which I haven’t delved into. I’ve been restocking my dual–extruded objects. Maybe next week I’ll be on Chess sets, but I want to eventually upgrade to the newest version of Sailfish, …