Collaborate Disseminate
[Jacob Stanton]’s design for 3D-printable, stacking and locking boxes is a great example of design for manufacturability (DFM). MicroStacks show how part of good DFM is taking the manufacturing method’s …read more Continue reading To Lovers of Small Boxes: a 3D Printable Design Just for You
To get its engineers thinking about design for assembly back in the 1980s, Westinghouse made a video about a product optimized for assembly: the IBM Proprinter. The technology may be dated, but the film presents a great look at how …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Design for Assembly, 1980s-Style
[Dan Royer] shared a tip about how to get a reliably tight fit between 3D printed parts and other hardware (like bearings, for example.) He suggests using crush ribs, a tried-and-true solution borrowed from the world of injection molding and repurposed with 3D printing in mind. Before we explain the …read more
Continue reading Adding Crush Ribs to 3D Printed Parts For a Better Press Fit
There are more free 3D models online than one can shake a stick at, but what about paid models? Hosting models somewhere and putting a buy button in front of the download is certainly a solved problem, but after spending some time buying and printing a variety of non-free 3D …read more
Continue reading 3D Printering: The World of Non-Free 3D Models Is Buyer Beware
Typically when we select a project for “Fail to the Week” honors, it’s because something went wrong with the technology of the project. But the tech of [Leo Fernekes]’ innovative LED sign system was never the problem; it was the realities of scaling up to production as well as the …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Bright Idea for LED Signs Goes Bad
Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Marketing and Selling Hardware Hack Chat with Shawn Hymel!
It may not be every hardware hacker’s dream, but a fair number of us harbor fantasies of thinking up the Next Big Thing and kissing the day job goodbye forever. It’s an …read more
The common belief is that big companies are out to get the little people by making products that break after a short period, or with substantially new features or accessories that make previous models obsolete, requiring the user to purchase a new model. This conspiracy theory isn’t true; there’s a perfectly good explanation for this phenomenon, and it was caused by the consumers, not the manufacturers.
When we buy the hottest, shiniest, smallest, and cheapest new thing we join the wave of consumer demand that is the cause of what often gets labelled as “Planned Obsolescence”. In truth, we’re all …read more
Continue reading Planned Obsolescence Isn’t A Thing, But It Is Your Fault
Formlabs makes a pretty dang good SLA printer by all accounts. Though a bit premium in the pricing when compared to the more humble impact of FDM printers on the wallet, there’s a bit more to an SLA printer. The reasoning becomes a bit more obvious when reading through this two part series on the design and testing of the Form 2.
It was interesting to see what tests they thought were necessary to ensure the reliable operation of the machine. For example the beam profile of every single laser that goes into a printer is tested to have the …read more
