This week in 3D printing 8th to the 14th of January 2011
January 8th. Makerbot is crowned best of CES by David Ewalt of Forbes.
January 10th. Dr. Adrian Boyer of the RepRap project writes about Hod Lipson”s Factory @ Home report for the White House. You should take the time to read it here.
January 10th. Fabbaloo reports on Andrew Monti”s idea for “Books that print” using QR codes.
January 11th. Fab Camp Liverpool is a go, it is a weekend “aimed at raising awareness of the revolution in digital fabrication.” Visitors will be able to 3D print and learn about it and other manufacturing technologies at the event.
January 11th. MIT student Charles Z. Guan makes a Make-A-Bot, a Fused Filament Fabrication machine based on RepRap and Makerbot.
January 11th. The Times features 3D printing in an article “Lost your car key? Never mind, print another with new 3-D printer.”
January 12th. An open source guitar is 3D printed using Blender and an open innovation company called Zoybar. This is an example of network
Open source guitar 3D printed using Blender
Kevin Holmes of The Creators Project writes about an open source guitar that was made using Blender, Zoybar and 3D printing. The guitar, called the Tor was designed by the Norwegian SD Baard. Zoybar is an “open R&D” project where research is being carried out into musical instruments. There people can download the files and order the parts they need to create their own musical instruments while Zoybar (and anyone who cares to join) does the research into new designs and parts. Then a 3D printing company then manufactures the body for the guitar. Zoybar  is a great model for an innovative business and I would expect to see this emulated in many other fields as time goes by. We”re not sure about the price though, Kevin quotes $175 but the kits we saw on Zoybar were much more expensive than that. A while back someone 3D printed a flute, now a guitar. How long until you can 3D print your entire band?
Via Digg.
3D printing & Individualization: Why I don”t want to be in your shoes.
Personalization is just putting your name on something at Zazzle. Customization is making a few choices to get an approximation of what you want. This is just like what you can do now with a car configurator on any car website. Many things can and will be customized and personalized. But, both these things can (at least partially) be done with regular mass manufacturing technology. With Individualization you need new technology, such as 3D printing or old technology such as artisanship. Individualized products and individualized production go beyond mass manufacturing towards a new kind of paradigm for products and services. With individualization not only will your shoes not fit me but I wouldn”t want to wear them anyhow.
Here is the dictionary definition of Individualized: Â “to make individual in character; to treat or notice individually : particularize ; to adapt to the needs or special circumstances of an individual <individualize teaching according to student abil
This week in 3D printing: 1st to the 7th of January 2010
This week was a rather calm one for 3D printing. Still with hundreds of blog posts and tweets about the technology each week the industry is more in the spotlight than it’s ever been. 2011 is going to be an exciting and crucial year for 3D printing. I hope to catalogue it all here in weekly posts giving an overview of what”s happening in 3D printing this week. Think I”ve missed something? Suggest it below.
January 1st onward. A Designboom article on a “food 3D printer” buzzes around the net. Featuring the Fab@Home 3D printer the story was already well known to people following 3D printing with most of the examples being a few years old, but somehow still made a big splash.
January 1st onward. Another big splash was made by Amit Zoran”s 3D printed flute.
January 1st. It started incredibly well for me personally when my 11 3D printing predictions for 2011 article went live on Techcrunch and was retweeted around 900 times. I don’t like to be a tooter of ones own horn but th
why 3D printing will never go mainstream
A question I get asked several times a week is, “when will 3D printing go mainstream?” I have a new answer for that, never. 3D printing will never go mainstream. Why? Because if 3D printing goes mainstream, there will be no mainstream.
Carl visualizes his daughter”s heart problems
My daughter has a heart problem, the images of the heart and my research into her condition has been helped greatly by being able to visualise this file. It also helps her understand the problem. As a natural structure I also think the heart is quite beautiful.
— Carl Hitchens
Carl Hitchens is Materialise”s Software Manager for the UK and Ireland. His daughter Megan was 6 in 2008 when she was diagnosed with two congenital heart defects, a PDA Patent Ductus Arteriosus and a VSD ventricular septal defect. Initially Megan”s parents “explained with books and she knew the problems and what symptoms she should be aware of.” Carl though works with Materialise software that is used to scan and render parts of the human body. MRI scans of a patient for example are used as a basis for surgical planning using Materialise Mimics. He decided to show his daughter her heart problem by 3D printing a scan of the heart using i.materialise. Megan liked the model and it helped her und
3D Printed Flute!
Amit Zoran 3D printed a completely working flute on an Objet Connex 500. Look and more importantly listen to this amazing 3D printed thing!
Via Bruce Sterling
i.materialised a Christmas Leaf
Last year Steve Swisher made a lovely Christmas Leaf for his wife. We wanted to share this design and also wish you a Merry Christmas!
My wife loves leaves so I thought it would be nice to surprise her with a Christmas ornament leaf I designed myself. To give it a personal touch I put some custom words on the bottom. Voila!
— Steve Swisher
The Christmas Leaf is 3D printed using Stereolithography. The material used is a translucent epoxy and this is then hand painted with a translucent coat of green paint.
Rolls Royce is going to 3D print aircraft engines
The Merlin Project is a €7,120,000 EU research project that will be conducted by Rolls Royce in conjunction with other aircraft engine manufacturers. The aim of the project is to over the course of three years explore the use of 3D printing to make aircraft engines in order to reduce their enviornmental impact. The project aims to use 3D printing “to allow environmental benefits including near 100% material utilisation, current buy to fly ratios result in massive amounts of waste, no toxic chemical usage and no tooling costs, to impact the manufacture of future aero engine components. All of these factors will drastically reduce emissions across the life-cycle of the parts. …. Light-weighting, and the performance improvement of parts will result in reduced fuel consumption and reduced emissions….Impacts will include the development of high value, disruptive AM technologies capable of step changes in performance which will safeguard EU companies in the high value aero engin
Hella Jongerius” 300 unique ceramic vases
Celebrated Dutch designer Hella Jongerius has an obsession with imperfection. She developed 300 unique vases to acompany special editions of her new book, Hella Jongerius:Misfit. The video below runs you through the entire production process of the vases.
We often think of 3D printing as the de facto technology for developing unique objects. Hella”s vases however are caramic and made by the venerable Royal Tichelaar Makkum (the Netherlands oldest company, founded in 1572). I think it is interesting to watch designers experiment with unique, with designing something that will be result in many different items that somehow stay well within the designer”s intent. Mr. Tichelaar hits the nail on the head in the video, “its not designing, its creating. Its exploring, its experimenting. Sometimes its very nice and somethimes you think its a bit strange, but its always beautiful. It always has a value, which you would like to cherish.” This is the best explanation I”ve heard yet of
