A 3D printing coworker with a Rigidbot got a hold of some of the fancy support material used in high end FDM 3D printers. What this stuff is we don’t know, but we know it dissolves in lye and ABS sticks to it in a 90 degree heated chamber. But will it work on a home 3D printer? I gave …
Lords of Waterdeep minis
I have been working on this set for a long time. It’s actually been mostly done for a while but until I switched to Simplify3D I couldn’t produce the necessary detail. But now I can. Know what’s tough? Making detailed minis that print at only 1″ tall on FFF printers is tough. At that size the details have to be …
Wood Wars Stag head
I was going for deer but I feel like I landed somewhere closer to elk with maybe a little buffalo. I’m still pretty happy with it. It’s got style, it’s got chunky details that print well, it’s good. The antlers print separately and snap in. We’ll, not so much snap in as get glued and forced in. I may have …
Why FFF 3D printing can’t do transparent
I’ve made a discovery recently. A coworker was playing with “transparent” ABS filament and I decided to get some myself and see just what it was capable of. And while the filament itself is clearly (heh) transparent, prints always turned out milky. I decided to investigate why. The first thing I printed was a filament holder to hold the spool …
Wood Wars bear soldier update
Work on Wood Wars progresses with the first modular pawn. The bear/soldier combination took exactly as long as I feared it would to make, which is to say a lot longer than I hoped. The first iteration of the pose (above) pushed overhangs way too much, so I had to switch the staff to one hand and add a shield. …
Can wood art be recreated with 3D printing?
I was inspired by a kickstarter for woodcut art by artist Gabriel Schama where he made coordinated patterns in 1/8 wood that were then layered to great effect. The process looked a little to me like the layers of a 3D print, so I decided to see if 3D printing could recreated the effect. I started with modeling the shape, only …
Harry Potter Crests for my Son’s School
Last year my eldest son’s grade did some Harry Potter themed instruction and I made a wand for him. This year my second son is in the same grade and his idea was to print a Gryffindor crest for his group. I decided to make crests for all the houses to be fair. Fortunately there are excellent crests already made …
Joe’s 3D Workbench is live
I’ve been thinking for a while that I should do this. But the logistics escaped me until I saw an instructable on using an old Android phone add a webcam and I thought, “I have an old Android phone, I should do this”. So I did and now the workbench is live. And by live I mean whenever I print something …
Covering the sunglass with tinted plastic
And now for the exciting conclusion to my sunglasses video. I considered many different sources for something I could use to block light and UV for my sunglasses. I explored tinted lighting gels like they use on stage, but most of those are either tinted or UV blocking, not both. Fortunately my plan B worked well. I decided to find …
Deathly Hallows Pendant
This is an idea that’s been percolating for a long time. There are a ton of Deathly Hallow’s 3D pendants out there, but none of them actually use the Deathly Hallows as objects. Well, no more. Presenting the Deathly Hallows as objects arranged like the symbol for the Deathly Hallows. Some liberty was taken with the relative scale. I’ve made …