Collaborate Disseminate
Back when 3D printers were pretty new, most of us had glass beds with or without painter’s tape. To make plastic stick, you’d either use a glue stick or hair …read more Continue reading Homebrew 3D Printer Goop Promises Better Bed Adhesion
A 4D printed object is like a 3D printed object, but it changes shape or self-assembles when its environment changes. [Teaching Tech] has been reading about this technology and decided …read more Continue reading DIY Self-Assembling 4D Printing
It’s an age-old riddle: if you have a perfect sphere with a perfectly reflective inner surface, will light bounce around inside it forever? The answer is pretty obvious when you …read more Continue reading Cannonball Mold Makes a Dandy Integrating Sphere for Laser Measurements
Style counts, and sometimes all it takes to jazz up the product of a 3D-printer is a 2D printer and a how-to guide on hydrographic printing.
Hydrographic printing, sometimes called hydrodipping, is a process for transferring graphics onto complex-shaped objects in one simple step. A design is printed on a special film which is then floated on the surface of a tank of water. The object to be decorated is carefully dipped into the water right through the film and the design wraps around all the nooks and crannies in one step.
The video tutorial below details the steps to …read more
It’s like the old quip from [Henry Ford]: You can have your 3D prints in any color you want, as long as it’s one. Some strides have been made to bringing more color to your extruded goodies, but for anything beyond a few colors, you’re going to need to look at post-print processing of some sort. For photorealistic 3D prints, you might want to look into a simple hydrographic printing method that can be performed right on a printer.
If some of the prints in the video below look familiar, it’s because we covered the original method when it was …read more
Continue reading Decorate Your 3D Prints with Detailed Hydrographic Printing
While robots enter other industries in herds, the assembly of garments has long been a tedious, human privilege. Now, for the first time, a robot has sewn an entire, wearable piece of garment. Sewbo, an industrial robot programmed to tackle the tricky task, assembles clothes and makes it look easy.
Despite their precision, robots still lack the cognitive abilities and motoric skills to process soft fabrics reliably. Sewbo tackles this by impregnating the fabric with PVA, a non-toxic biodegradable polymer. The temporarily stiffened fabric then can be processed as if it were sheet metal. It can be welded, molded, and …read more
Continue reading Sewbo Robot Sews Up Automated Garment Manufacturing
Most hobby 3D printers are based on FDM, extruding a single-color noodle of melted plastic to build up an object. Powder-based inkjet 3D printing allows you to print detailed, full-color models from a plaster-like material. The process uses ink and water droplets, dispensed from an inkjet print head to selectively fuse and color layers of a powdered binder material. When you see an offer for a 3D printed miniature version of yourself (or someone else), they are made with powder. [Aad van der Geest] wants to put this technology on your desktop with ColorPod, a kit that converts your FDM …read more
Continue reading Full Color 3D Printer Upgrade Leaves Competition In The Dust
Think laying down molten plastic on a 3D printer is as easy as squeezing plastic filament out of a hot tube? It’s not, and anyone who had a 3D printer in 2009 would tell you as such. There were hobbed bolts that stripped the plastic into a gooey paste, extremely large x carriages that made everything wobbly, and nothing worked as well as it does today.
Technology marches on, and this year’s Midwest RepRap Festival had people showing off the latest advances in pushing plastic, and something that hasn’t seen much use yet – dissolvable filament.
When …read more
Continue reading MRRF: Innovating Extruders and Dissolvable Filament
