3D Printing & Imaging

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!

Laser-cutting old vinyl LPs

Laser-cutting old vinyl LPs

Personally, these laser-cut plastic end tables by Israel’s Studio Groovy (Fair warning: I couldn’t actually find them on their Flash-y website.) are not to my taste, but I really like the fact that that they put some old vinyl records in their laser cutter and managed to make something fairly cool out of them. Bonus: The table on the left uses the cut-out from the table on the right as decoration, so there’s very little waste. [via Recyclart]

Ball-chain gears on Thingiverse

Ball-chain gears on Thingiverse

Vik from the RepRap blog created these printable ball-chain gears, and uploaded STLs and SCADs to Thingiverse. I have finally managed to print tiny little ball-chain gears that work with 3.3mm and 3.5mm diameter ball-chain and still fit on the NEMA17’s 5mm output shaft. The trick is to print the gears in two pieces. As […]

Letters From the Fab Academy, Part 4

Letters From the Fab Academy, Part 4

In this series, “Letters from the Fab Academy,” Shawn Wallace, member of AS220, the Providence, RI community arts space, shares his experiences with the Fab Academy, a distributed learning collaborative, built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. — Gareth 3D Scanning By Shawn Wallace Victor Freundt prints a project using the ZCorp printer […]

DIY cleanroom on a budget

DIY cleanroom on a budget

When Bill from I Heart Robotics decided he wanted a cleanroom, he did what any self-respecting maker would do — he built one from scratch. First, he put together a budget lab bench/enclosure from heavy duty MDF shelving. Next, he 3D printed some endcaps to couple a dust filter to a PC cooling fan. Finally, he used a shower curtain to close off the front.

3D printing stackable girders

RepRapper Forrest Higgs designed an interlocking beamed structure that could be 3D printed — thus advancing the RepRap’s stated purpose of someday being able to print new RepRaps. Currently much of the support structure cannot be printed. But what if printable girders could be stacked on top of each other? Higgs’ project may not be […]