If you’re a maker, 3d printing is an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Not only can it help bring your projects to life faster, but it can also offer unique results that would be difficult (or impossible!) to achieve with traditional methods. In these blog posts, we’ll provide you with some essential information and tips regarding 3D printing for makers—including the basics of how to get started, plus creative tutorials for spicing up your projects. Whether you’re already familiar with 3d printing or are just starting out, these resources will help take your game-making skills even further!
Why scratch out a game of naughts and crosses on the sidewalk when you can use a computer-controlled mill to carve a board and pieces out of solid billet aluminum and bronze? Thingiverse user hugomatic knows the answer to that question, whatever it may be.
MakerBot Industries announced their new printer, the Thing-O-Matic, incorporating a bevy of new features like the Automated Build Platform (upsized for a larger print area), the MK5 plastruder, as well as a completely revamped Z-axis. The price has jumped about 20%, and the new machine costs $1,225 from the MakerBot store. So sweet!
Spotted on Thingiverse, these neato printable tool clips by elite MakerBotter Christian Arnø of Norway, creator of the MakerBot dremel mount and the printable MakerBot! Output some today and get organized!
News of the big Stargate prop auction got me Googling around for entrepreneurs selling replica, um, replicators. Which search yielded this handsome handmade necklace from DeviantArt user DreamingDragonDesign. There’s also a 3D-printable replicator block on Shapeways.
This impressively complex deployable spaceframe was designed by Studio Dror. It’s called Volume.MGX and was printed via selective laser sintering (SLS). I guess hanging it over a light bulb and calling it a “lamp” makes for better video than setting a piece of glass on it and calling it a “table.” Still, fun to watch it squish and un-squish.
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, by user tmo-photo, these 200% scale Lego minifigs printed on a MakerBot.
Tormach wants to sell you an upgrade package for your Mach3-compatible CNC robot that includes a 1.3M USB microscope with 220X optical magnification, a mounting bracket, and all the necessary software to turn your CNC equipment into a scanner. The cool part is they’ve also produced a video showing how to hack together a slightly-less-powerful system using a $20 pen cam and some free software that will let you make 2000 dpi scans limited only by the size of your CNC bed envelope. The “killer app” for this equipment is automatic reverse-engineering of parts, but you could also use it to easily scan maps, posters, artwork, or other oversize stuff. [via Hacked Gadgets]
