Cloning the RepRap Prusa in under 30 minutes
The grounbreaking research/hacking team at The University of Washington’s Solheim lab have begun cloning RepRaps. The RepRap project is a project that aims to make an open source self-replicating 3D printer. If sucessful this would make 3D printers available for the cost of the materials alone. At the Solheim Lab the Open3DP project is undertaking lots of research to support open 3D printing innitiatives. They have just now annouced that they can produce all the plastic parts for the Prusa Mendel in 30 minutes using molding. They call the resulting Prusa clones Clonedels. They represents a significant cost and time saving for producing the Prusa and should help put 3D printers into the hands of more people.
The Prusa Mendel is the simlpest 3D printer in RepRap’s line up. Open3DP’s RepRap breeding program set itself a goal of producing ten Mendels in ten weeks. The team redesigned the parts to they could be used for silicon RTV molding. They then 3D printed the parts and pr
3D printing Rodin’s Thinker
Rodin’s Thinker is quite possibly the world”s most famous sculptures. In 2007 the Singer Laren museum was burgalarized and 7 statues were stolen. One of them was a Rodin’s Thinker. The men did not want to sell the statues but rather wanted to destroy them and sell them for scrap metal. 6 statues were destroyed but a badly damaged Thinker was recovered. The statue, with an estimated value of between 3 and $10,000,000 had been hacked in to by the men as the tried to take it apart so they could melt it down. Over these past years the team at Singer Laren have repaired the statue.
Two images below are of the broken Thinker.
The Thinker has a headache.
3D scans were taken of the damaged Thinker and of the original mold kept by the Musee Rodin in Paris and they were compared. Then Materialise was asked to 3D print the Thinker. We 3D printed the statue on one of our Materialise Mammoth machines, the largest 3D printers in the world. A mold was made of the 3D prin
Cats don”t care about Net Neutrality, do you?
Cats don”t care about Net Neutrality, do you?
Currently all the information on the internet is treated equally. The bytes from Mary”s My Little Pony fan site are as important as the bytes from the websites of large corporations. Some sites might load quicker because they have better hosting but all the information enters your home at the same speed. The principle of Net Netraility means that Internet Service Providers can not discriminate between types of content they are giving you internet access to and at what speed they give you acess to that content. You simply pay them a monthly fee and you get all the internet has to offer. All at the same speed. This gives all websites equal opportunity to get the word out and provides for the beautiful chaos made by millions of voices that is the internet today.
In only two days on the 16th the US congress will hold a hearing on Net Neutrality. Currently it seems that congress might repeal Net Neutrality laws and even pro
i.materialised a fruit bowl
Mille et une fruits by Mika De Bruijn
I”m fascinated by graphic patterns and geometrical patterns in particular. Also, I was looking for a new item in my interior that could match both the modern style of my furniture and the souvenirs I gathered during my travels to North Africa and the Middle East.
Inspired by the “Honeycomb” fruit bowl in the .MGX collection, I designed my own version in Rhinoceros, incorporating the previously mentioned elements. Since a free form shape like this one is practically impossible to manufacture using conventional techniques, it was great to be able to print it through i.materialise.
-Mika De Bruijn
The Mille et une fruits bowl was 3D printed in polyamide on an Selective Laser Sintering system.
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February 5th to 11th 2011: This week in 3D printing
Tuesday 8th of February. This press release tells us a tale of an engineer using a Bits From Bytes RapMan to 3D print a scale model. This is interesting because a lot of people now consider “kit 3D printers” such as the RepRap, RapMan and Makerbot to be consumer 3D printers. Desktop 3D printers such as the Objet24 & UPrint on the other hand are considered to be for businesses. Where will the two markets meet?
Wednesday 9th of February. Public Knowledge and Michael Weinberg continue their victory lap around the internet with their Catan Story.
Friday 11th of February. Fabbaloo informs us that the Mcor paper 3D printer is spreading out its wings over Europe.Â
Friday 11th of February. This week 1.6 million readers of The Economist are confronted with a cover story about 3D printing. The articles inside mention Stratasys and EOS and the subtitle on the homepage is a rather positive, “The manufacturing technology that will change the world.” This is a huge step forward. And
3D printing a supercar, the Citroën GT
One of the best selling and most exciting racing games out there is Gran Turismo 5. And one of the most remarkable cars in that racing game has to be the GT by Citroën. In 2008, Citroën, Polyphony (the makers of the game) and Materialise joined forces and the virtual racecar was turned into a real fully-functional car. Later that year, the five-meter long concept car made its global premiere at the Paris Motor Show. We do a lot of 3D printing work on concept cars but are sadly almost never allowed to talk about it. Luckily, this time, we’ve been given permission to show you how 3D printing was used to create a large portion of this supercar.
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The Economist on 3D printing: Print me a Stradivarius
My favorite news source is The Economist. I have a moment of pure zen happiness when I read the magazine cover to cover every week. The next Economist will feature 3D printing. The cover of the February 12th to 18th edition of the magazine features a violin 3D printed by EOS using the EOS SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) technology. Its one of the first cover stories on 3D printing, it will not be the last.
The Economist has an audio preview of their piece on 3D printing here.
The Babbage article Print me a Stradivarius is here.
Another article The Printed World is here.
Via Nicolas De Bock image is via here.
Unfold”s L”artisan Electronique A virtual pottery wheel
I love Unfold. The Belgian design duo are fun & good designers that have a string of interesting projects under their belt. Last year they unveiled their L”Artisal Electronique. This is a virtual potterywheel that you can use. The resulting designs can then be 3D printed on Unfold”s ceramic 3D printers. The duo developed made their own ceramic 3D printing process using RapMan 3D printers. I think its an amazing project and wanted to share with you a video I just saw of their virtual pottery wheel in action. Its months old, eons in 3D printing time, but I really enjoyed watching it and would not want you to miss out. Also, when is someone going to put one of these in every mall?
Designguide.tv interview from Unfold on Vimeo.
Via Gert Kruitbosch.
Titanium 3D printing to be used on the Joint Strike Fighter
Sigma Labs inc. a company made up of Los Alamos researchers has just recieved a grant from the US Air Force Materials Research Laboratory to create a monitoring and control system for 3D printing titanium. Monitoring and control might seem boring but making 3D printing more precise, efficient and repeatable is exactly the kind of thing the technology needs in order to be used in actual manufacturing.
The system is to be used for the Joint Strike Fighter and will acording to CEO Richard Mah “create a quality-assured manufacturing process which will improve titanium”s utilization ratio by a factor of 5 or more, thereby saving millions of dollars in materials costs per aircraft – for military and civilian aircraft alike.” Â
So, this is no fanciful dream “oh won”t it be wonderful once everyone uses 3D printing to make tea cups.” This is a business decision to use 3D printing to save costs on what is one of the biggest US military procurement projects ever undertaken. O
3D printed robot snake
It turns out you can make some pretty amazing things with Objet. In addition to the 3D printed flute and a coffee cup and scissors you can also 3D print a robotic snake. The YouTube video had 14 views when we found it! The robotic snake was made by Objet distributor Tri Tech, in the UK. So far we assume that only the outer shell of the snake is 3D printed but we”re trying to find out more for you!
UPDATE: We”ve magically discovered another video going more into detail about using polyjet 3D printing to create the snake and “real world testing of biorobotics.” We”ve added it below. 3 YouTube views, incredible! People, there is more to the world than just cats.
