Fab n’ ship cats Shapeways continues to offer fun new materials; this time, gold. From today until the 30th you can order Gold Plated Stainless Steel. This new material gives our 3D printed Stainless Steel a pure gold finish. This will let people create jewels and jewelery using 3D printing with a lot more bling […]
Big news! We’re SO EXCITED to announce the winners in the MAKE/MakerBot CupCake CNC 3D printer kit giveaway! Participants were asked to design 3D objects and upload them to Thingiverse, where they were judged by Bre Pettis, Gareth Branwyn, and Becky Stern based on complexity, ingenuity, and “MakerBottability,” or how likely they are to print […]
This is the perfect no-sew craft for anyone who loves to sew! LucyKate Crafts is a cute blog filled with clever projects like this button necklace. Sometimes there’s just not enough hours in the day to stitch up handmade gifts, but this simple project still screams crafty!
I have often opined that truly creative problem solving comes from limiting one’s options, rather than expanding them. Which is why prisoner’s inventions fascinate me so much. (If you’ve not had a chance to browse Angelo’s Prisoners’ Inventions book, BTW, I highly recommend it–it’s not about shivs or improvised weapons, but about how prisoners make game pieces, heat water, control the climate in their cells, etc., etc. using only the odds and ends they are permitted by, or can slip past the attention of, the state.) Compare an object like this prop handgun, which was reportedly used by John Dillinger in his escape from the Crown Point, Indiana Jail in 1934, to, say, a modern-day toothbrush handle, or a Nike sneaker, designed by a professional working with a CAD-CAM system, industrial machine tooling, and a smorgasboard of rainbow-colored polymers and elastomers, most of which add no functional value at all, and are employed just to make a product stand out from competitors on the shelf. Granted, an escaping prisoner and a product designer have wildly different goals, but if asked “which is doing more creative, original problem-solving,” I know how I’d answer.
Follow the Team Bobcat Ford Fiesta caravan… Come Along on American Journey 2.0 What do you get when you combine automobiles with location-aware computing? A winning team of students from the University of Michigan is hitting the road in a cross-country trip to find out! In a class this spring entitled “Cloud Computing in the […]
Jen Cotton writes: Want to know how to make a precise shape on the potter’s wheel? Well here’s one way I’ve used to make a specific form. It is sort of a mash up of techniques between a plaster wheel and a potters wheel.
This bowl is actually carved from a block of normal bricks joined with mortar. Even though it looks lathe-turned, I can’t imagine that a slab of conventional brick masonry would hold together during turning, even if you could find a lathe that was able to turn it. Maybe it could be done at extremely low speed? Suffice to say I’m very curious about their process, and other examples on this page lead me to suspect it involves a CNC mill and/or a shop full of very dedicated craftspeople. [via Dude Craft]
