3D Print In Wax, Cast In Metal

January 31, 2012 by Kevin Dady 39 Comments

What does dry ice, ethonal, wax beads, and a blender have in common? It was the first attempts at making media for this wax 3D printer that [Andreas] has been building up. Wanting to produce 3D printed objects out of metal, and finding that direct metal laser sintering machines were still out of reach of reason, he set out to find a different way.

After trying a few different methods of making the powdered wax himself, he decided that it was much more time effective to just buy the stuff. Using the commercially available powered wax mixed with activated carbon, and a custom printer, the wax is blasted with a moderately high powered laser. More wax powder is applied over the freshly sintered layer, and the 3d part is built upwards. Once he has the part in wax, he can then make a mold of it and cast metal using the Lost Wax Casting method.

While the quality is not perfect, and you still need a roughly 2500$ laser setup (which was borrowed from his school) its surely a step into the future.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

Continue reading “3D Print In Wax, Cast In Metal” →

Converting A Mill To CNC

January 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

For most of the past year, [Joel] has been working on converting a manual mill to a CNC mill with the addition of a computer, brackets and stepper motors. He’s put an amazing amount of effort into his project, and the result is awesome and much less expensive than buying and shipping an old Bridgeport mill.

The project started with this mill from Grizzly. It’s a step above the small ‘hobby mills,’ but still very affordable at $1200 shipped to [Joel]’s driveway. The work began by fabricating an enclosure for the PC and motor drivers out of an electrical panel box. The controller box includes a touch screen, keyboard and computer running Mach3 CNC software. The computer connects to a breakout board with a trio of motor drivers providing power for the stepper motors on each axis.

After a few months (good things take time), [Joel] was ready to attach the stepper motors to the axes of the mill. He’s just put up a few videos of milling copper-clad board for PCBs and surface machining ABS, viewable after the break. For a total investment that is less than finding, buying, and repairing an old industrial mill, we’ll call [Joel]’s project a success.

Continue reading “Converting A Mill To CNC” →

3D Printed Helicopter Blades

January 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

If you’re like us, you’ve been infatuated with the small RC helicopter you picked up on Amazon up until the point where it careened off a wall and broke its blades. Now that you’re wondering about what to do with that small pile of plastic, metal, and electronics, why not print some helicopter blades on your 3D printer?

[Taylor] printed these blades on his Utilimaker, but we don’t see why they couldn’t be printed on a Makerbot or other RepRap. The first set of printed blades worked on the top rotor, but they were too heavy when all four blades were replace. The parts were edited in netfabb using a 0.08mm layer height and now they’re working perfectly. As far as free tools go, Slic3r is the new hotness for .STL to Gcode conversion and now that [Taylor] put the files up on Thingiverse, anyone can print a set of spare blades.

Check out [Taylor] comparing his printed blades to the stock ones that came with his awesome heli after the break.

Continue reading “3D Printed Helicopter Blades” →

Trashed Hard Drive? Why Not An Engraved Clock?

January 21, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 19 Comments

So your hard drive quit working. Don’t despair, with a “little” work your disk can be repurposed into a clock like the one seen above. I made this clock after several iterations of various success, including the first revision, which was simply the platter with a clock kit from a hobby store screwed into the middle. Still a very neat effect, but if you want to actually tell what time it is, it helps to have the numbers available.

For this, you’ll need some sort of CNC machine (a kit-build router in this case), and some way to generate the Gcode to get everything cut correctly. A guide to how the logo was eventually turned into something a machine could understand is provided here. Of course if you’re not sure what logo would look good on your clock, you can always skip a few steps and engrave the our logo. In this [HAD] article, it’s conveniently provided in .dxf format, which can be converted by a CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) program into code that your machine can understand.

Check out after the break for a video of two “platter clocks” being engraved using these methods: Continue reading “Trashed Hard Drive? Why Not An Engraved Clock?” →

Print Huge Stuff With The Makerbot Replicator

January 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 71 Comments

The folks at MakerBot Industries are introducing their new 3D printer at CES this week. It’s called the MakerBot Replicator and features dual heads for 2-color prints and a huge build envelope for huge objects

From [Bre Pettis]’ introduction video (available after the break), the build area is about 9x6x6 inches, compared to the about four-inch cube-sized volume for the MakerBot Cupcake and Thing-O-Matic. The Replicator also features optional dual Makerbot Mk. 8 extruders for two-colored printing. We’ve seen valiant attempts at printing multicolored objects with one extruder, and if you’d ever want to print with two filaments dual extruders are the way to go.

The replicator also features a nice control panel (which includes a Snake game), something that’s relatively rare on the 3D printers we’ve seen. The single extruder model will set you back $1750, while the dual extruder adds another $250 to the price. We really want one of these, but don’t take our word – check out [Bre]’s intro.

Continue reading “Print Huge Stuff With The Makerbot Replicator” →

3D Printing Minecraft Worlds

January 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to build an awesome tabletop game or model train layout scenery, you probably couldn’t do better than printing Minecraft worlds on a RepRap. This guide comes courtesy of [Nudel] who figured out how to use Mineways with his RepRap. While [Nudel]’s landscape print doesn’t have the full color of something from Shapeways, he only spent $3 in materials. Not bad if you’d like to print out your server’s world.

We have to give a shout out to [erich666] for his amazing work on Mineways. He bills his work as a bridge between Minecraft and a 3D printer or Blender. You can check out [erich]’s demo of Mineways after the break.

Of course the state of printing voxels wouldn’t be where it is today without the work of two guys at the MIT Media Lab and their work on Minecraft.Print(). If you manage to print out your base/castle/village, add it to the Mineways Flickr group.

Continue reading “3D Printing Minecraft Worlds” →

Milling Ice Molds For Craft Cocktails

January 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Want some fancy ice for your next cocktail party? You can try to find spherical ice-cube trays but you won’t get the kind of results seen here. It turns out the trick to this isn’t how you freeze the water, it’s how you melt the ice.

[Brendan O’Connor] started this project after seeing an ice mold that could make beautiful shapes rather than just cubes. But the price tag was $1400. If he could make his own at a hackerspace we’d bet that would pay his membership for an entire year!

The concept is pretty simple. The video after the break shows the mold he was trying to recreate. It’s two hunks of metal with a shape milled into them. The mold is pre-heated, then an oversized hunk of ice is placed between the blocks. The heat melts away the parts you don’t want, and leaves a perfectly shaped ice orb in between. Gravity is responsible for pulling the mold halves together as they slide along some machined rods.

With a big hunk of scrap aluminum he milled two halves of a sphere. They can be sufficiently heated if held under running water, and a some leftover printer rails keep the two parts aligned as the ice orb is formed. Now [Brendan] just needs to work on his method of creating a crystal-clear ice block as a starter and he’ll have achieved total win.

Continue reading “Milling Ice Molds For Craft Cocktails” →