Your Comments
When we post new content on MAKE, we love hearing from our readers. Whether the comments be informative, insightful, or funny, here are our favorites from the past week, from Makezine, our Facebook page, Google+ Community, and Twitter.
Month: March 2013
How-To: Wicked Kicks
Defy a bit of gravity with a pair of awesome DIY wicked kicks shoes!
Busy Retiree’s Filament Extruder Wins Fabrication Competition
Last year, at Maker Faire in San Mateo, we launched a global competition to find ways to reduce the cost of producing parts on a 3D printer that uses plastic filament as its feedstock.
3D printing holds great promise for prototyping and small-volume production, but it has the potential for high volume production as well. Over time, the software interfaces that control these machines will improve, the number of files available for printing will increase exponentially, and the precision of the machines will be indistinguishable from parts made on an injection molding machine. However, to become competitive with conventional manufacturing processes, the unit cost of each part produced by 3D printers must be reduced.
Low-cost 3D printing, including Up! Plus, Makerbot’s Replicator II, Cubify, Printrbot, Solidoodle, and the Ultimaker, range in price from $399-$2200. These machines require extruded plastic filament that costs about $40-$54 per kg. This is between 5-10 times the cost of the raw resin pellets.
How-To: Make Four Leaf Clover Stamps with Toilet Paper Tubes
Making St. Patrick’s Day crafting plans with your little ones? Make your own easy four leaf clover stamps with toilet paper rolls!
Tips for Flying the ELEV-8 Quadcopter
Our friends Nick, Kevin, and Jess from Parallax just released this video with tips for getting started with the ELEV-8 Quadcopter. It outlines common beginner mistakes and how to correct them, along how to safely get airborne the first time out.
How-To: Knit an Alien Facehugger
Ravelry user sweaterpoorly created this marvelous knit alien facehugger and a detailed tutorial to go with it!
Build a 3D Scanner Out of Junk… in 24 Hours
Last June, the LVL1 hackerspace in Louisville, KY, held a 24-hour hackathon, where several teams stayed up all night, competing with each other to use an Arduino, a breadboard, as well as any components they could harvest from LVL1’s junkpile, to build the coolest project possible. Joe Pugh and his fellow members Aaron Verdow, Tim […]