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
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.
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.
Inside the .MGX Flagship Store: the world”s first shop for 3D printed goods
As you probably already know .MGX opened the world”s first physical store for 3D printed goods only weeks ago. They”ve just redone the entire interior for this season. We think it is beautiful and would like to congratulate our colleagues at .MGX on their sucessful store for 3D prints. We would also like to show you the first images of the new interior. Besides featuring the work of many other noted designers this season the .MGX showroom has a special focus on the work of designer Peter Jansen.
In the window above you can see the Tulip.MGX lamps at the bottom by Peter Jansen. These lamps are designed with mathematical formulas used in Chaos theory. The large lamp hanging from the ceiling is one of the Minishakes.MGX family by Arik Levy. The Minishakes work is based on an earlier work titled Handshake that currently resides in the Centre Pompidou.
The sculpture in the centre is titled Runner by Peter Jansen. This is the only work in the showroom that is not curren
Objet 3D prints a skateboard deck, faucet, coffee cup & scissors
Objet, the Israeli 3D printer manufacturer announced a few months ago that it was coming out with a number of new materials. I was just tipped of this video where they show some of the applications of their new stronger ABS-like materials. In the video they show you how they”ve 3D printed scissors and a skateboard deck with Objet machines and materials. Objet”s polyjet process has traditionally had a high level of detail but the parts have not been strong and have had low heat resistance. These new materials are a great improvement and you can watch the video below.Â
The video is 8 minutes long. You can skip directly to a nice transparent piece here, the skateboard deck here (they only talk about the deck, the rest seems not to be 3D printed), they also have a multimaterial piece that is printed in rubberlike and other material on the same printer, you can see a faucet or tap they made here and here you can see 3D printed scissors. The working coffee cup is here but i
This week in 3D printing: 29th of January – 4th of February 2011
January 30th. 3DTin is on Makezine. 3DTin is basically “lego like” 3D modeling tool in the browser whose designs can be exported for 3D printing. Also, if you”ve heard of Minecraft you should take to this. By limiting us to making things in blocks 3DTin does limit what we can make with the tool. But, because of this limitation we are able to create things. 3DTin and its brethrenwill be very sucessful. How do I know? Because the Makerbot put out this lengthy and wonderful article out and a a few days later had a follow up with more tips.  I”ll show you some test 3D prints of 3DTin things as soon as I get to it.
Feb. 2nd. Iris van Herpen”s 3D printed fashion collection is featured on FastCo and many news and fashion blogs worldwide.
Feb. 3rd. NeoMetrix to Display 3D Scanning & 3D Printing Solutions at MD&M Show in Orlando, FL. If that sounds like a press release it is because it is. I quote, “a  great opportunity to introduce the benefits of 3D scanning and
The 6 Geekiest 3D Prints Ever
At Materialise we’re an unabashedly geeky company. We have more engineers than non-engineers and you’re more likely to run into a medical researcher, PhD, cryptographer, software devloper or a structural engineer than a marketing person during lunch (last time I checked we had 6 marketing people out of a 1000 employees). So when Materialise employees use i.materialise we exepct some geeky 3D prints. We combed through them all and came up with what we believe to be the 6 geekiest 3D prints of all time.
6. The Sinusoid Lamp. by Volodymr Chabanenko (a copy is currently serving as my desk lamp at the office!). “I suppose that a figure generated by mathematical equations looks better than something I would be able to design myself. I am just better at mathematics than at 3d modeling. I spent a few days using wxMaxima to look for the set of equations. I finally found that an ordinary sinusoid being stranded to a cylindrical shape looks pretty good.”
5. The Greeble Effect by Urs
