Interesting Snippets

A pair of model makers — Vincent Rossi and Adam Metallo — are taking on the task of digitizing the Smithsonian Institute’s 137 million-piece collection with high-tech scanners and 3D printing. Once the process has been perfected, 3D printing will create close copies of artwork and specimens. The mammoth task of replicating and web archiving the almost two-century-old collection will allow the institute to display one-of-a-kind art at multiple locations and interactively on the web, according to a CNET report.

We believe that the next stop in copying will be made from digital form into physical form,” TPB declares. “It will be physical objects.” Three-dimensional printers and scanners are just the first step toward a sharing environment that will be characterized above all by fluidity between atoms and bits. Or: “You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The range of those products was as unusual as the way they were made: an exhaust manifold; an artificial leg; an aircraft door-hinge; dozens of shoes; even entire dresses can be fashioned this way. Many of these printed items look strikingly different from their conventional counterparts. They are more elegant, less clunky and have flowing lines. The result, shown off on plinths and in display cases, was more like an art gallery than an industrial exhibition. Additive manufacturing, then, is changing not only how things are made, but what is made.

personal manufacturing is currently going through much the same phase as personal computing did in the 1970s. In many ways, that makes MakerBot the MITS of today. It has sold over 5,000 of its Thing-O-Matic 3D printers, which retail for $2,500 fully assembled or $1,299 in kit-form. Meanwhile, a newcomer from the Netherlands called Ultimaker, which costs $1,700 as a kit, is winning fans for its raw speed and ability to handle larger jobs. Some wonder whether the Ultimaker could be personal manufacturing’s Apple II.

Over the past week, Brook Drumm, an internet entrepreneur and workshop tinkerer in Lincoln, California, raised more than $155,000 in “kickstarter” funding on the internet from people who pledged money in exchange for one of his clever little Printrbot machines. Mr Drumm offers everything needed to assemble his basic 3D-printer for $500. Could that be today’s equivalent of the Sinclair ZX81, the world’s most popular PC in the early 1980s?

Hermit crabs don’t make their own shells. They scavenge their homes. And now, hermit crabs are facing a housing shortage… As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species and offer our digital design skills and 3D printing capabilities and give hermit crabs another option: 3D printed shells.
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This is a new frontier of crowdsourced science. Please design shells that you think a hermit crab would like and upload them… (they will then print out and offer to hermit crabs in their test labs to see which work best)

Makerbot Industries, who make do-it-yourself 3D printers, launched Project Shellter last Tuesday. Project Shellter intends to leverage the Makerbot community’s design talent and network of 5,000 3D printers to design and produce shells for hermit crabs who face a species threatening, man-made housing shortage

It won’t be long before people have a 3-D printer sitting at home alongside its old inkjet counterpart. These 3-D printers, some already costing less than a computer did in 1999, can print objects by spraying layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes. People can download plans for an object, hit print, and a few minutes later have it in their hands.

Call it the Industrial Revolution 2.0. Not only will it change the nature of manufacturing, but it will further challenge our concept of ownership and copyright. …
“Copyright doesn’t necessarily protect useful things,” said Michael Weinberg, a senior staff attorney with Public Knowledge, a Washington digital advocacy group. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected.”

in Tokyo, (there is a) service called CloneFactory …
The service uses multiple DSLRs to take snapshots of your head, render it in 3D, and then print it out in plaster using a 3D printer. Hair, make-up, and coloring are added and then your head is stuck on a little plastic doll. …

The service costs 138,000 yen and is popular with new brides who want to capture their hairstyle and make-up in miniature before the big day.

the most exciting aspect of additive manufacturing is that it lowers the cost of entry into the business of making things. Instead of finding the money to set up a factory or asking a mass-producer at home (or in another country) to make something for you, 3D printers will offer a cheaper, less risky route to the market. An entrepreneur could run off one or two samples with a 3D printer to see if his idea works. He could make a few more to see if they sell, and take in design changes that buyers ask for. If things go really well, he could scale up—with conventional mass production or an enormous 3D print run

Little by little a machine is “printing” a complex titanium landing-gear bracket, about the size of a shoe, which normally would have to be laboriously hewn from a solid block of metal. Brackets are only the beginning. The researchers at Filton have a much bigger ambition: to print the entire wing of an airliner.

Far-fetched as this may seem, many other people are using three-dimensional printing technology to create similarly remarkable things. These include medical implants, jewellery, football boots designed for individual feet, lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries and customised mobile phones. Some are even making mechanical devices. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter Schmitt, a PhD student, has been printing something that resembles the workings of a grandfather clock. It took him a few attempts to get right, but eventually he removed the plastic clock from a 3D printer, hung it on the wall and pulled down the counterweight. It started ticking.