3d printing

846 Articles

3D Printed Shoes Make Bigfoot Tracks

March 2, 2022 by 18 Comments

[Stephan Henrich] is probably going to set off a wave of bigfoot sightings if his new shoe, the Cryptide sneaker takes off. The shoe is completely 3D printed in flexible TPE using a laser sintering printer from Sintratec. The shoe takes a name from cryptozoology and, in fact, would leave a puzzling footprint due to its articulated toes and scaly-looking sole.

Judging from the look of the sole, it should be pretty cushy and we presume if you were 3D printing these, you’d scan or precisely measure the intended foot for a perfect fit. You can see a video about the shoe below.

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3D Printed Climbing Holds, Now With Texture

February 26, 2022 by 4 Comments

Technology enables all kinds of possibilities to mold our environments in the way we best see fit. Plenty of ski resorts use snowmaking to extend their seasons, there are wave pools for surfing hundreds of miles away from oceans, and if you don’t live near any mountains you can build your own climbing wall as well. For the latter, many have turned to 3D printers to create more rock-like climbing grips but plastic doesn’t tend to behave the same as rock unless you do what [Giles Barton-Owen] did and incorporate salt into the prints.

For small manufacturers, typically the way that the rock texture is mimicked is by somehow incorporating sand, permanently, into the grip itself. This works well enough but is often too rough on climbers’ hands or otherwise doesn’t faithfully replicate a rock climbing experience. For these grips, instead of including sand, salt crystals of a particular size were added to a resin that was formed over the 3D printed grip. Once the resin cures substantially, the water-soluble salt can be washed away leaving a perfect texture to grab onto with chalked hands.

While this might not be a scalable method for large-scale climbing grip manufacturers, [Giles] hopes this method will help smaller operations or even DIY climbers to build more realistic grips without having to break the bank. In fact, he has already found some success at his local climbing gym using these grips. The method may be more difficult to scale for larger manufacturers but for anyone who wants to try it out themselves, all that’s needed for this build is a 3D printer, salt, and time.

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Bend Your Vase Mode Prints By Hacking The GCode

February 22, 2022 by 3 Comments

[Stefan] from CNCKitchen wanted to make some bendy tubes for a window-mountable ball run, and rather than coming up with some bent tube models, it seemed there might be a different way to achieve the desired outcome. Starting with a simple tube model designed to be quickly printed in vase mode, he wrote a Python script which read in the G-Code, and modified it allow it to be bent along a spline path.

Vase mode works by slowly ramping up the Z-axis as the extruder follows the object outline, but the slicing process is still essentially the same, with the object sliced in a plane parallel to the bed. Whilst this non-planar method moves the Z-axis in sync with the horizontal motion (although currently limited to only one plane of distortion, which simplifies the maths a bit) it is we guess still technically a planar solution, but just an inclined plane. But we digress, non-planar in this context merely means not parallel to the bed, and we’ll roll with that.

[Stefan] explains that there are quite a few difficulties with this approach. The first issue is that on the inside of the bend, the material flow rate needed to be scaled back to compensate. But the main problem stems from the design of the extruder itself. Intended for operating parallel to the bed, there are often a few structures in the way of operating at an angle, such as fan mounts, and the hotend itself. By selecting an appropriate machine and tweaking it a bit, [Stefan] managed to get it to work at angles up to 30 degrees off the horizontal plane. One annoyance was that the stock nozzle shape of his E3D Volcano hotend didn’t lend itself to operating at such an inclination, so he needed to mount an older V6-style tip with an adapter. After a lot of tuning and fails, it did work and the final goal was achieved! If you want to try this for yourselves, the code for this can be found on the project GitHub.

If you want to learn more about non-planar printing, we’ve covered the process of non-planar slicing a while back, and if you think your 2.5D printer doesn’t quite have the range for really funky print paths, then you may want to look into a robot arm based printer instead.

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Building A High-Capacity Linear Servo Actuator

February 17, 2022 by 19 Comments

Linear actuators are useful things, moving things in straight lines rather than annoying circles like so many motors. [Retsetman] recently built a linear servo actuator of his own design with accurate positional control.

The design relies on a carriage that moves along a threaded rod, perhaps the most rudimentary design of linear actuator. A large brushed DC motor is used to turn the threaded rod through a 3D-printed 9:1 herringbone geartrain, shifting the actuator back and forth. End stop switches are used to disengage the motor to avoid damage to the mechanism. Feedback is via a ten-turn potentiometer driven off the output geartrain to match the range of the actuator to the rotational range of the pot.

The final build has a stroke of approximately 100 mm, and can lift and hold a 15 kg weight with ease. In a pull test, the actuator failed at a load just shy of 100 kg. If you’re looking for something smaller, though, you can try building a linear actuator out of old DVD drive parts instead. Video after the break.

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Printing Magnets

February 14, 2022 by 29 Comments

A research center in Spain has been working on ways to solve recent supply chain issues. One of these issues is a shortage of materials to make magnets. Their answer? Recycle ferrite residue by treating it and mixing it with ABS for 3D printing.

The mixing of ferrite with a polymer isn’t the key though, instead the trick is in the processing. The team collected strontium ferrite waste and ground it to a powder. Heating to the point of calcination (about 1000C) creates a superior material with a 350% increase in coercitivity and a 25% increase in remanence over the original waste material.

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3D Printing Tiny Metal Parts

February 14, 2022 by 7 Comments

It may sound like a pop band, but μ-WAAM is actually a 3D printing technique for making small metal parts from the NOVA University Lisbon. Of course, WAAM stands for wire arc additive manufacturing, a well-known technique for 3D printing in metal. The difference? The new technique uses 250 μm wire stock instead of the 1mm or thicker wires used in conventional WAAM.

The thinner feed wire allows μ-WAAM to create fine details like thin walls that would be difficult to replicate with traditional methods. Typically, for fine structures, printers use fused metal powder. This is good for fine details, but typically slower and has higher waste than wire-based systems.

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3D Printing Rainbows

February 13, 2022 by 18 Comments

[The Action Lab] had a very serious technical problem. His daughter wanted to 3D print sparkly unicorns. But how do you make a 3D print sparkly? Turns out, he had used a diffraction grating before to make rainbow-enhanced chocolate.

The method turns out to be surprisingly simple. Using a diffraction grating as a print bed, puts the pattern on the bottom of the 3D print and — thanks to how a diffraction grating works — the 3D print now works like a grating, too.

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