Solving a problem at the Optometrist

“Have a seat and remove your glasses.” “Aaaaand… where should I put them?” The thing about doctor’s offices is they often give me plenty of time to come up with solutions to trivial problems like “where do I put my glasses?” I’m sitting in that chair attached to something that could conceivably be used to pilot a star craft and …

Wood Wars Video follow up.

I printed the Wood Wars base soldier I recorded a time lapse of modeling and it worked great. Details look fine. I still want to revisit it and add some detail but I should probably focus on other units first. Making detail minis (with exchangeable heads) is a lot of work and I keep having smaller, easier to finish, projects pop …

Updating the space wrench

So after dissecting the space wrench I got to thinking about the problem of it only being for tightening bolts and how to fix that. After some discussion in the comments on a similar video by Barnacules I think I have a solution. A removable center peg that can be flipped to the other side reversing the ratcheting action to loosen …

The biggest lithophane I’ve ever

This was a Christmas gifts I can finally tell you all about, the biggest lithophane project I’ve ever seen. Definitely the biggest I’ve done. Oh, man, the technical hurdles over come for this one. First of all, the lamp we got had 4 panels that were too big for the print bed. So I had to rig adapters to turn …

Inserting magnets into prints

Here’s the theory. You print something, then as it’s printing you pause the print at specific points and drop a buckyball magnet into the print. Then you continue the print and let the bucky ball get sealed off. Here’s how it works in real life. Not very well. First of all you have to fight the super strong magnets that …

Lithophane keychain/charm

My second post in the 3D printed gifts posts was inspired by someone on shapeways offering keychain lithophanes. I realized I could totally do that and it would be a perfect gift. I opted for a round design because it was simple but I realized it could be adapted to any number of shapes with just a little more time. …

Testing Modio for Android

Modio is a cool app that is basically a library of home 3D print ready parts for robots that you pick from to assemble in software, then download to your computer for slicing and printing. It exports to STLs so it can work for any 3D printer. I played with it a little when it first came out on a …

Modeling for 3D Printing – Wood Wars Base Soldier Time Lapse

A little something different this week. Set up a time lapse as I modeled the generic pawn soldier pawn for the upcoming Wood Wars remake I mentioned in my Distributed Manufacturing response video then overlayed it with some royalty free music in YouTube. I’m going to be out of town for 2 weeks to be with family. I’ve been pretty regular …

Guiding the wise guys

We have a Nativity in our house that is kid safe. So naturally the star quickly went missing. Thank heavens it was the monochromatic part with the simple geometry. A little measuring of the peg with my calipers and it was off to Blender. Rotate the default cube 45 degrees, subdivide in the X and Y, pull the corners out …

Kid scans to game pawns

This week has been super busy with last minute Christmas etsy orders. But I got a little to talk about. Remember those Kinect scans I did of my kids? They had some ideas for some edits they wanted. So I spent some time and made some figures for them: I designed them to be printable (if only just) at 1″ …