Jeshua Lacock recounted his experience of casting metal parts directly from 3D Printed PLA with a fantastic photo-filled writeup and video. He prints the part with his Ultimaker and pours mold material around it before letting it set. After the mold hardens, it’s placed in his homemade furnace to melt away the PLA, leaving a beautiful female mold behind, into which he can pour molten metal.
Why pay more for colored prints when you can use off-the-shelf dyes to make them any color you want? Atlanta-based designer Colleen Jordan walks us through the simple process of dying 3D Printed parts from Shapeways, or a similar service, in just a few steps.
Nick Normal and I attended the first Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo recently. Here’s a collection of our pictures and recollections.
Sure, your 3D Printer runs reliably as long as it sits safely at home, but what would happen if dozens of college students used it each week? Georgia Tech Mechanical Engineering student Jeff Landrum discusses the challenges behind building, managing, and automating a “printer farm” at one of the largest student-run makerspaces in the country.
Joshua Harker has been a maker and artist his whole life. He worked professionally as a product and toy designer for a few years before turning to 3D art. Within the last year and a half, he’s created the first and fourth most funded sculpture projects on Kickstarter, and sold thousands of beautiful works of art, all created with 3D Printing. I spoke to him about his process and his views on the current state of the 3D Printing industry.
Sketchfab, a website for uploading and sharing 3D models for free, is a great way to easily add an interactive element to your web content. Their model viewer can be embedded in almost any webpage, and they’re adding new features on a fairly regular basis. I caught up with co-founder Alban Denoyel to check in on their progress.
Student Tamara Worst used two 3D sensors, a Wii remote and Microsoft Kinect, to detect the orientation and position of a surgeon’s right foot in the OR. She wrote software in Processing to allow them to view and manipulate images and 3D models without the use of their hands.
