Installing GLaDOS in the ceiling of your house

glados-ceiling-light

Install this light fixture in your bedroom and you might kiss your nights of peaceful sleep goodbye. Fans of the Portal game franchise will recognize it as a smaller version of the megalomaniacal artificial intelligence character from the game. This particular rendition is how she looked in the second installment of the series. The lamp is the creation of [Dragonator]. … Read the rest

Fixing tools with 3D printers

saw

Over at the Manchester Hackerspace, [Bob] has been busy getting a 30-year-old bandsaw up and running. The saw worked great, but it was missing a fence, making straight cuts difficult to say the least.  The solution, of course, was to build a new fence, and [Bob] decided to capitalize on his hackerspace’s workshop by making a new fence with a Read the rest

Smoothing 3D Prints with Acetone Vapor

Acetone Smoothed Prints

If you’ve ever used an extruding 3D printer, you know that the resulting prints aren’t exactly smooth. At the Southackton hackerspace [James] and [Bracken] worked out a method of smoothing the parts out using vapor. The method involves heating acetone until it forms a vapor, then exposing ABS parts to the vapor. The method only works with ABS, but … Read the rest

LulzBot is giving away more printers

LulzBot, the awesomely named 3D printer manufacturer and parts supplier, is giving away eight of their AO-100 printers to eight lucky hackerspaces.

It’s not so much a contest, but instead a giveaway aimed at eight community-operated hackerspaces who come up with a great idea on how to use a 3D printer. If you’re part of a well-established hackerspace that doesn’t … Read the rest

Printed vacuum pump muffler quiets the lab

printed-vacuum-pump-muffler

[Joel] made a brilliant improvement to his shop. If you think about it, most folks would hear a loud vacuum pump and either tolerate it or put in some ear plugs. But [Joel] heard a loud vacuum pump and thought: hey, I can fix that! His solution was to design and print his own muffler.

He did a bit … Read the rest

Midwest RepRap Festival

We’re a US-centric site, but aside from events in New York or California, we don’t see many hacker, maker, or 3D printer events aimed at the parts of the country filled with corn and WalMarts. The 1st annual Midwest RepRap Festival aims to change that with enough events, speakers, and activities to make Elkhart, Indiana look like the hoppingist place … Read the rest

Repairing broken injection molded parts with a 3D printer

injection-molded-part-repair

The value of a 3D printer is obvious for people who hack hardware as a hobby. But this repair project should drive home their usefulness for the commoner. [James Bruton] used a 3D printer to recreate a hopelessly broken injection molded plastic part. This is a suction cup mounting bracket for a Tom Tom GPS module. The sphere which … Read the rest