3d Printer hacks

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Who Wouldn’t Want 3D Printed Candles Of Yourself On Your 70th Birthday?

March 25, 2014 by 21 Comments

3d printed candles

[Christian Lölkes] needed a unique gift for their CEO’s 70th birthday — We mean really, what do you get someone who probably has everything? Well… you 3D scan him and make candles in his likeness of course!

Since they have both a 3D scanner and 3D printer at work, this was the obvious choice. Instead of printing the mold out, they opted to print a high resolution figurine of their CEO, and then make a reusable silicone mold instead. When you’re designing a figurine for candle casting, it’s important to make a nice wide base, as this will make pouring the hot wax into the mold much easier.

There are lots of different ways to make molds, but to make theirs they decided to use a toilet paper roll for convenience. After taping up the mold with the figurine inside, it’s time to fill it with silicone. Unfortunately bubbles form in silicone so you need a way to force the bubbles to rise to the top and pop — vibrating the mold is a good solution, and setting it on top of a washing machine is an easy way to accomplish it.

Once the silicone is cast, you have to cut the mold in half carefully as to not damage your figurine. Then it’s just a matter of zip-tying the mold back together, inserting a wick and pouring wax in! Cool.

3D Printed… Measuring Tape?

March 25, 2014 by 41 Comments

3d printed measuring tape

Here’s a new one to push the envelope… How about a 3D printed measuring tape?

This unique 3D printed tool was designed and printed in a single job.  [Angry Monk] has been challenging himself lately with these intricate designs, having recently finished a completely 3D printed set of dial calipers, which is impressive in its own right.

Looking for his latest challenge he pondered what it would take to make this 3D printed tape measure. As he continued to think about it he realized how complex it would actually be to pull off. After designing and printing a few of the basic parts to help him solidify his ideas, he set to work. This tape measure has 114 individual parts. It includes 52″ of tape links with 1″ divisions and markings down to the 1/8th of an inch. It even features a hand crank (sorry no spring return) to roll up the tape.

Now as you can imagine, a complex assembly like this is a bit out of the realm of possibility for regular hobby 3D printers — a UV resin printer might be able to do it, but [Angry Monk] used a commercial Objet Eden 3D printer. Still though — it’s an impressive display of design, check out the following video and see for yourself.

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Soft Robotics, Silicone Rubber, And Amazing Castings

March 24, 2014 by 13 Comments

Most of the robotics projects we see around here are heavy, metallic machines that move with exacting precision with steppers, servos, motors, and electronics. [Matthew] is another breed of roboticist, and created a quadruped robot with no hard moving parts.

[Matthew] calls his creation the Glaucus, after the blue sea slug Glaucus atlanticus. Inside this silicone rubber blob are a series of voids, allowing compressed air to expand the legs, gently inching Glaucus across a table under manual or automatic control.

Even though no one seems to do it, making a few molds for casting on a 3D printer is actually pretty easy. [Matthew] is taking this technique to an extreme, though: First, a mold for the interior pressure bladders are printed, then a positive of this print made in silicone rubber. These silicone molds – four of them, for the left, right, top and bottom – are then filled with wax, and the wax parts reassembled inside the final ‘body’ mold. It’s an amazing amount of work to make just one of these soft robots, but once the molds and masters are made, [Matthew] can pop out a soft robot every few hours or so.

There’s a lot more info on Glaucus over on the official site for the build, and a somewhat simpler ‘compressed air and silicone rubber’ tentacle [Matthew] built showing off the mechanics. Video below.

 

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Home Made Resin Based 3D Printer Is Incredible

March 22, 2014 by 18 Comments

Resin based 3D printers (SLA) are the next big thing, and while they may seem daunting at first, in some ways they are actually simpler than FDM machines with less moving parts! Loosely following an Instructable, [Dan Beaven] has just finished putting together his own home-made 3D DLP Printer, and it’s bloody brilliant.

He owes a lot of thanks to [Tristram Budel] and his incredibly detailed Instructables guide on building  a 3D DLP printer, but [Dan] has also added quite a bit of his own flair to the build. Most notably is his method of separating layers from the vat of resin — most designs tilt the bed slightly to counter the suction forces, but his slides the vat back and forth along the Y-axis, which seems to work extremely well.

The printer is built out of 1″ T-slot aluminum and has a NEMA 17 motor that provides the Y-axis movement along two linear rods for the vat. The Z-axis stage uses a NEMA 23 motor and has a whopping 14″ of travel. Combined with a 104mm x 204mm build plate, this thing can print some decently sized parts!

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MRRF: Roundtable And Roundup

March 20, 2014 by 9 Comments

Last weekend Hackaday made a trip out to the Midwest RepRap Festival in Goshen, Indiana. We met a ton of interesting people, saw a lot of cool stuff, and managed to avoid the Amish horse and buggies plying the roads around Goshen.

We’ve already posted a few things from MRRF, including [Jordan Miller] and co.’s adventures in bioprinting, a very cool printable object repo that’s backed by a nonprofit LLC, some stuff from Lulzbot that included a new extruder, stretchy filament, and news of a 3D scanner that’s in development, ARM-based CNC controllers including the Smoothieboard and capes for the Beaglebone, 3D printed resin molds, the newest project from [Nicholas Seward], creator or the RepRap Wally, Simpson, and Lisa, and 3D printed waffles. It really was an amazing event and also the largest DIY 3D printer convention on the planet. How this happened in Goshen, Indiana is anyone’s guess, but we’d like to give a shout out to SeeMeCNC for organizing this event.

With so many famous RepRappers in one place, it only made sense to put together a round table discussion on the state of RepRap, 3D printers, and microfabrication. We have a 40-minute long video of that, which you can check out after the break.

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KamerMaker Begins Printing A House

March 20, 2014 by 35 Comments

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The KamerMaker is the world’s largest portable 3D printing pavilion built out of a shipping container — it has started printing an entire house out of plastic.

We first shared the KamerMaker (literally “Room Maker” in Dutch) a few years ago when it was first designed and built as a collaboration project between Utilimaker and Architectburo DUS. Their intention was the ability to print 1:1 architectural designs, and now it has begun its biggest project yet — an entire house along the canal in Amsterdam.

So far the KamerMaker has printed one corner of the Canal House, which features part of a staircase. It weighs about 400lbs and took a week to print. To increase the strength of these 3D printed parts, the company uses a honeycomb infill and before assembly will fill the gaps inside the piece with a type of foam that becomes as hard as concrete.

The project is estimated to take three years for completion, and until then you can visit it at Tolhuisweg 7, 1031 CL in North Amsterdam, where it is open to the public for a small fee of €2.50 — this is a tourist city after all! When completed it will be a design museum, although the team at DUS hope it will be only the first of many 3D printed buildings.

To learn more about the project, stick around for the following video.

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Heated Build Chambers Don’t Have To Be That Complex

March 19, 2014 by 46 Comments

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Looking to improve the quality of your 3D prints? Worried about peeling, warping, and de-laminating layers? All you need is to do is make a heated build chamber!

The heated build chamber is one of the patents that the big 3D printer company owns (we won’t point any fingers), and that’s why you don’t see it as a feature on any of the “consumer” grade 3D printers. But that won’t stop people from making their own!

[Repkid] just finished a wiki page on this topic, and it’s a great way to build a heated chamber — if you have the space for it! He’s built a large wooden enclosure for his RepRap out of MDF sheets. Double-ply cardboard is used as thin insulation, although we imagine if you’re building something this large you might as well use some commercial insulation.

The chamber is heated by a blow dryer which is mounted off the back of the box, and the heat is controlled by changing the speed setting of the dryer. A laser cut vent allows for further adjustment. If you want to get really fancy, it would be very easy to install a thermostat PID controller that could regulate the temperature more accurately. To prevent overheating the electronics, all the control boards are also outside of the box.

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