Original Bucky Fuller geodesic dome home sales model ca. 1960
Man, what a cool artifact. Not $7,500 cool, IMHO, as I can appreciate it just fine from the photo over at Wright Auctions, but to each his or her own. [via Core77]
miniatures
Electronic component nesting dolls
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this cool set of five hand-painted Matryoshka dolls from user funnypolynomial. The tiny solder blob goes inside the diode goes inside the LED goes inside the resistor goes inside the capacitor.
How-To: Cast your own miniatures from a master model
I’ll admit to having wargame minis on the brain this morning. As a commenter on my earlier post pointed out, a cheaper alternative to Shapeways printing of your entire computer-modeled miniature army is to print just one of each unit type, then use the print as a master to make your own mold and cast a bunch of duplicates. Heck, while you’re at it, you might even just print the mold itself. This page provides a set of pretty good tutorials about duplicating miniatures by casting. [Thanks, RichB!]
Print your own wargaming minis
It used to be that if you wanted anything other than “stock” miniatures for your games, you had to laboriously customize or scratch-build each unit by hand. Now, if you can use Blender, you can design, pose, and print your army and have them shipped to you, ready to paint.
Fold-up “robotagami” figures
Lubbock, Texas artist Dustin Wallace, whose larger one-off/limited edition transforming robot sculptures I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, also makes these wicked little “robotagami” dudes that are CNC-cut from sheet metal (stainless steel or copper), ship flat, and get slotted together and folded up to make a dimensional figure by the buyer.
Sparebots par excellence
The idea of makin’ little dudes and dudettes from your leftover components is not new to us, but rarely have I seen it done with such élan as in these examples from Flickr user(s) Lenny&Meriel. There’s tons more! [via MAKE Flickr Pool]
Post-apocalyptic Wizard of Oz minis
Nomad of Static Painting produced these awesome Road-Warrior-meets-Toto mashup minis. The figures themselves are available from Studio Miniatures. As an encore, might I suggest The Wizard of Oz gang as characters in the HBO prison drama Oz? Or vice versa? [via Neatorama]
