Human bones are amazing—seriously, they’re incredibly cool—but up until recently, it’s been hard to engineer a synthetic material that replicates the super-strong structure of the real thing. Now, scientists in Germany are using a 3D printer to do just that—and it could mean a breakthrough for how we build everything from architecture to spacecraft.
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The obvious plan of attack when you’re building a stool is to just toss a round wooden seat on the top and call it a day. It’s functional, for sure, but nowhere near as creative as Arthur Schmitt’s Anice Stool, which is a 3D-printed plastic core that lets you use whatever material you want for the seat.
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It may look like an alien desk tidy, but you’re actually looking at a bicycle frame hot off the 3D printer.
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Everybody needs a chess set. And if you’re going to have a chess set, it might as well be a fun chess set, like MakerBot’s Dragons of Glastonbury chess set. That way, if you get bored playing chess, you can always just stage a huge medieval battle in your living room.
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What you’re looking at here are necklaces without the chain. The pieces in Maria Jennifer Carew‘s LessIS series are kind of like decorative paperclips for your clothes: unconventional, yes, but clever as hell and lovely, too.
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An enterprising 16-year-old in Kansas recently 3D-printed at prosthetic hand for his 9-year-old family friend, giving the young tyke the use of fingers for the first time in his life. And he did it all at the local county library.
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Not everything always came in technicolor; TVs, movies, and photography only existed in black and white for the beginning. And while 3D printing has been largely stuck with single-color creations, it’s recently started to explore more colorful results
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The new PS3 racing game Gran Turismo 6 lets players drive concept cars made expressly by automotive companies and other brands for the game. Honda is one of those companies, but it’s also using a newer form of technology to reach out to its fans. The Japanese automaker recently made 3D models of its concept cars available for download.
As of this writing the Honda 3D Design Archives features five downloadable 3D models, headlined by the 2013 Acura NSX Concept. You can also download the Fuya-Jo, the FSR Concept, the Kiwami and the toaster-like Puyo from the website. Not familiar with any of those cars? Check out this video:
Man, I need to step my daydream game up. Drive your browser to Honda 3D Design Archives and download the models.
[via TomoChan Store]
3D printing can help you create prototypes or mockups quickly. Or should I say relatively quickly – it can take a 3D printer hours to print even moderately-sized objects. To speed things up, students from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute tested adding LEGO to their workflow.
Researchers Stefanie Mueller, Tobias Mohr, Kerstin Guenther, Johannes Frohnhofen and Patrick Baudisch call their project faBrickation. The idea is to print just the crucial parts of a prototype, then build the rest out of LEGO. To do that, they wrote a program called faBrickator, where they can open 3D models…
…and “Legofy” it at the press of a button.
Then they just mark the parts of the model that will be printed…
…and build the rest with LEGO using instructions generated by faBrickator.
They can also use faBrickator to go back to a 3D model, modify it and then print only the parts that were changed, once again saving time.
The group claims that on average, faBrickation lets them make prototypes nearly two and a half times faster than using 3D printing alone. I wonder if they can make a reverse faBrickation scanner, so laypeople can start making a “3d model” out of LEGO instead of a modeling software, scan that LEGO model then run the resulting model through faBrickation.
[via Hasso Plattner Institute via PSFK]
We know that 3D printers can print objects out of plastic, food, animal tissue and metal. Now a company called Mark Forged claims that its upcoming Mark One 3D printer can print using carbon fiber, the wonder material known for its high strength-to-weight ratio and cool looks. Something tells me this printer will hit a high money-to-ink ratio as well.
The Mark One can print objects with carbon fiber at up to 200 microns thick. It can also print using PLA, fiberglass and nylon at up to 100 microns, so you can make objects mainly out of those cheaper materials then reinforce or decorate them a bit with carbon fiber. You can check out the printer’s other specifications on Mark Forged’s website.
The Mark One will be available this March for $5,000 (USD). Some of Gizmag’s commenters have two major criticisms about the Mark One though. First is that you can already buy carbon fiber-reinforced PLA filament. Which means you can start printing carbon fiber objects now and with your existing 3D printer.
The second criticism is that although carbon fiber is strong in itself, in high-end applications the material is molded – i.e. the fibers are aligned and woven – in ways that maximize certain properties, one of which is strength. In other words, a 3D printed carbon fiber object may not turn out to be as strong or durable as other carbon fiber products.
For my part, I’m worried that future customers will be able to buy the Mark One’s carbon fiber filament only from Mark Forged. And also that folks are more excited about this than the one that prints pizza. Folks. THIS ONE PRINTS PIZZA. Why is that not receiving funding from all living organisms in the universe?
[via Gizmag]
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