Introducing Brass 3D Printing
Looking for a high detailed metallic material that looks amazing and doesn’t cost you a fortune? Then Brass is the way to go for you. It’s a very shiny material due to its high-grade polished gold plated layer while offering a high level of detail giving it that 18-carat golden look. It’s a material that fits perfectly between 3D printed gold and gold plated stainless steel and here’s why…
- Gold Plated Stainless Steel: Cheapest option but less detailed
- Brass: Cheaper than Gold but same level of detail and beautifully shiny
- Gold: Highly detailed like brass but more valuable
Gold plated brass is a great way to go when designing things such as small jewelry or Steampunk based designs. It just looks phenomenal and expensive when it’s actually quite affordable compared to the real thing. Let’s have a look at what it would cost you to 3D print in this new material:
- 1cm3 will currently cost about 25 euros
- 5cm3 will currently cost about 95 euros
- 10cm3 will currently cos
3D print something in Bronze
Metal Month is in full gear now! We’ve got two metal based design challenges running, we’ve given you the ability to gold plate your stainless steel designs, and all of this at a 10% reduction through the month. Well guess what? We aren’t done yet. How about being able to 3D print in bronze as well? Does that sound cool to you guys? It sure as hell does to us, so without any further ado…
Starting today we’re giving you the possibility to 3D print in bronze.
To celebrate this new material, we’ve already taken our time to 3D print some nice designs by different designers for you. Below you can have a look at what bronze 3D printing looks like.
Okay great… so what about the print size? Well for now we are offering the ability to 3D print in bronze on a 5 x 5 x 5 cm bounding box. This will eventually change, but as we consider this a trial phase we want to start off small and work our way up as time goes by.
As for the pricing… well considering we’re trial
Announcing the Metal Accessories Challenge
A new Design Challenge in Stainless Steel
As was promised at the beginning of the month, we proudly introduce our second design challenge centered around metals. This time the weapon of choice is stainless steel and the theme is revolved around creating an accessory that makes your life easier. The challenge will be running from today (Friday the 15th of June) until the end of July (Tuesday 31st). So what are the typical kind of accessories that you could design or redesign in stainless steel? Below are some examples to get your brain stimulated…
Just some basic metallic accessories you could design or redesign
Of course there are other accessories as well, but this should give you a quick idea or reference to start with. So… the next obvious question would be “What’s the size we’re allowed to design in?” The answer to that question is: Anything that fits within a bounding box of 250cm3. So for example a bounding box of 10x5x5cm would be just fine. Your design has to be
Let your steel get a taste of Gold
Today we are introducing a new finishing process for your stainless steel designs: Gold Plated Stainless Steel. This is a finishing procedure where we take your stainless steel model and dip it in a gold bath giving it that gold plated look. We can offer your model in a polished or unpolished gold plating. The big difference here is that your polished pieces will feel smoother and look shinier whereas the unpolished ones will have that natural gold plating feel to it.
The model that you see here was made in Tinkercad by one of their community members called Whystler.
So… what’s it going to cost me to add some gold to my stainless steel? The answer is 6,00US$ whether its with a polished or unpolished finish (please note that this is on top of your cost for the stainless steel model).
The above model was designed by Tommy Rombouts (www.tommytones.com)
Okay… so I like the way it looks, but what I would also like the know how it feels in my hand? For this we
FabLab visits i.materialise
Last week we had the honor of receiving some lovely members from Belgian and Dutch FabLabs. They came with their beautifully creative minds to get a glimpse of i.materialise and the facilities we have at our disposal while sharing grand ideas and concepts for the future.
FabLabs (short for Fabrication Laboratories) are a wonderful establishment around the world where creative minds can come together to try out new ideas and fabricate new things. This is also why you’ll find the use of 3D printing commonplace amongst the FabLabs. As we all know by now, not all 3D printers can be stored at a FabLab as it would need a tremendous space and a huge staff to keep it all running. This is where 3D printing services like i.materialise come in.
So to get a better understanding of i.materialise, we decided to give them an introductory presentation and a guided tour of the Materialise facilities where our guests got to meet our different 3D printers. Afterwards we shared some interesting
Winner of the Father’s Day Challenge Announced
On May 16th we announced a design challenge for Father’s Day where participants could design something fun for their father with the wonderful Tinkercad software package. The challenge got some fun and interesting entries on their Facebook challenge page but as always, there can only be one winner. After a public vote it was made clear that Tinkercad user Samuel McCulloch was the favorite who’ll end up giving his dad a 3D printed Vulcan Bomber.
The Vulcan Bomber made in Tinkercad by Samuel McCulloch
On behalf of i.materialise we congratulate Samuel for winning the challenge and we also congratulate all participants for being a wonderful bunch to their dads. Your fathers can be proud!
However… we’ll be the first ones to let you know to never give up and keep on trying and participating in more design challenges. There are constantly more of them being organized such as the Silver Bead Design Challenge that is currently running at i.materialise. For this design challenge you
Imaginarium brings us Silver Indian Beauties
Mumbai based Imaginarium invites you to take a trip to the beauties of Indian culture in 3D printed silver. Today marks the beginning of a wonderful jewelry collection that’s brought to you by these talented creative minds. We start off today with three wonderfully detailed silver pendants that can be yours for the amazing price of 49,90 Euros and more lovely designs are to follow soon.
So if you’re into Indian history and culture, have a look at Imaginarium’s great gallery items. A preview can be seen below.
Do these lovely pendants inspire your creative mind? Do you also like to 3D print in silver? Then don’t hesitate to take a shot at creating some nice silver jewelry yourself by participating in our Silver Bead Design Challenge. The top 3 winners gets a free print of their designs!
Putting the Machine in the Spotlight
i.materialise and Design Platform Limburg have joined hands to bring the magic of 3D printing to an exhibition at the C-Mine in Genk called The Machine. Anyone that happens to be in the region can visit the exhibition that centers around designing a new industrial revolution. To celebrate this nice event, i.materialise has 3D printed a set of artistic tiles that are spread through the expo. Examples of these are shown below.
And to make sure that it’s not just about showcasing 3D printing but also being a part of it, Design Platform Limburg and i.materialise have decided to organize a 7-day summer workshop for a lucky 10 designers.
Included in the workshop are the following things:
- An introduction to Solid Works software by Itay Ohaly with personal guidance and supervision for the creation of your design
- A Save as Design Challenge by Maya Ben David and Jon Stam centered around designing a personal souvenir of the past from the mines
- A set of open workshops that h
Entering Metal Month
It’s the beginning of a new month and with it comes the beginning of a new time… a time to dive into the wonderful metallic materials that we offer here at i.materialise. Yes… this is our METAL MONTH where you get to enjoy our Stainless Steel, Titanium, Silver & Gold while witnessing the launch of even more metallic materials throughout the month. There are two wonderful design challenges with one of them starting today! And as cherry on top, we are offering a 10% discount on all metal orders with the use of a promo code. Do you like where this is going? Great! Let’s dive into the details…
The Metal Awesomeness you will find in our gallery
To give our community a better overview of what Metal Month is all about, we have put together a theme page in our gallery where you can browse what our designers have come up with in our metal materials. Below you’ll find some examples up close, and don’t forget to have a look around in the gallery for further inspiration!
Evaluating our lasers and their cost slicing capabilties
Last month we introduced the temporary pricing formula for our laser sintered polyamide & alumide designs that would fit within a bounding box of 125cm3. The community’s response was quite positive and this was definitely reflected in our numbers. As promised, we said that this would be a temporary trial and that we would evaluate its results afterwards. The month of May is over and so that’s exactly what we’ve started doing now.
In the meantime we have decided to still offer this nice pricing formula for polyamide & alumide designs that fit within a bounding box of 50cm3. This offer will continue to exist during our evaluation period and might change as time goes by. So to quickly recap…
- For any design that fits within a bounding box of 50cm3, you will always pay a standard price of 12 euros
- If you decide to 3D print multiples of that same design, you simply add 4 euros per copy on top of the start-up price of 12 euros (this means that if you want your design 3D printed
