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!

Pepakura-cast Halo helmet

YouTuber utubewarrenj is part of a community of cosplayers that are using a pretty amazing low-tech process to go from digital models to relatively accurate, durable real-world objects. Basically, they print out, fold up, and tape together elaborate paper models (for an idea of how much work this is, check out this video by SeamusRocks99), then fiberglass over and/or cast liquid polymer resin into them to produce durable full-size artifacts, which is what he’s showing here.

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3D printable business card case

If you’re going to give out delicate custom business cards that were made using the aid of some fancy machine, you’d better have the geek cred and 3D printed business card holder to back them up. More: Adafruit’s business card makes art! 3D printed business card holder (another one) PCB business cards Business card caliper

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3D printing in glass

The Solheim Rapid Prototyping lab at the University of Washington was in the news last March for developing a new 3D printing process that uses ceramic powder as an inexpensive alternative to the pricier substrates that are currently the de facto standard for powder-bed processes. Well they’ve done it again, this time with 20 micron glass powder, which is formed into an object by layerwise application of a liquid binder. When the part is complete, it can be sintered in a kiln to produce a continuous glass part. The official UW online press release includes a telling quote from lab co-director Mark Ganter: “It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything.”

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MakerBot z-crank

MakerBot z-crank

One of the hassles of my MakerBot is having to raise and lower the z-stage (the up-down platform holding the plastic extruder) by tugging on the rubber belt. Tug, tug, tug, just to get the extruder into the right position for beginning a print. Zaggo in the Thingiverse made a printable crank to solve this […]

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Printing braille

Printing braille

This is interesting, some examples of a Makerbot printing out braille, langfordw writes – This is still a work in progress but the MakerBot actually seems to print braille rather well. I can’t read braille so I can’t judge for sure whether it’s readable but it certainly seems like it. The trick is to get […]

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