Designing and 3D printing 30 coffee cups in 30 days

Cunicode, a design firm specializing in forms for 3D printers, challenged themselves to create and offer for sale 30 different coffee cups in 30 days. The cups are output from a printer capable of producing glazed ceramics on demand. Shown here, a Klein cup based on the Klein Bottle -- a Moebius strip with one more dimension*.

3D Printed Glazed Ceramics material properties are exactly the same as standard ceramics as it is produced with fine ceramic powder which is bound together with binder, fired, glazed with lead-free, non-toxic gloss finish. For some designs with clear bottoms, the bottom side may remain unglazed.

Glazing reduces definition of design details, for example grooves will fill with glaze. up to 1 mm of glaze can be added in certain areas.This means that some cups might look much smoother once printed than how they look on the drawings, keep that in mind if you purchase any of them.

One Coffee Cup a Day | 30 Days 30 Cups (via Neatorama)

*To forestall the topology pedants, here's the more formal Wikipedia definition, with additional formatting weirdness for lack-of-clarity: "a solid Klein bottle is topologically equivalent with the Cartesian product: \scriptstyle M\ddot{o}\times I, the Mobius band times an interval. The solid Klein bottle is the non-orientable version of the solid torus, equivalent to \scriptstyle D^2\times S^1."

• [oschene]

  Curses! Forestalled again!

• [kimberlychapman]

  I made a loud nerdgasm noise when I realized they were doing Kleiny things in ceramic on a 3D printer. Some of us had to do it by hand in the olden days of 2004 (http://kimberlychapman.com/crafts/ceramics.html#ceramickleinbottles).

  I want one of these printers so bad that I’m twitching.

• [Anonymous]

  hi, thanks for the comments.

  the cup is an approximation to a klein bottle,
  its geometry it is based on existing “glass klein bottles” http://bit.ly/iuPqp8

  *note to who bought the cups:
  1st, thank you
  2nd, these cups are small, espresso type. 45mm diameter (1.7 inches).

  I’ll post photos of the actual cup soon.

  cunicode

• [dargaud]

  Long time ago I saw some other solids whose inside connects continuously with the outside, such as the Klein bottle, but those actually did exist in our 3D world, unlike the Klein bottle. Anybody can point to such a list with pics ?

• [Sylvester McMonkey McBean]

  Just me or does that cup look like a bog roll?

• [capsteve]

  i wouldn’t want to clean a klein cup(or bottle), i might never find the bottom of the cup!

• [Anonymous]

  I just got the first 3DPrinted Cup in Ceramics,
  see it here: http://bit.ly/3DModel_vs_3DPrint

  Cunicode

• [wxwax]

  I love Boing Boing.

  But I confess to being a little perplexed by the high number of entries on 3D printing.

  • [jeligula]

    Read Cory’s novel “Makers” and you will no longer be perplexed.

• [knappa]

  Cory, I feel sort of bad posting this since it seems like you took the criticism last time personally. Also, because this time, my complaint _is_ somewhat pedantic*. You’ve correctly described the 3-dimensional solid Klein bottle, but not the Klein bottle. The Klein bottle is the boundary. (Like how the circle is the boundary of the disc, or the sphere the boundary of a ball.) Both the Klein bottle and the Mobius band are two dimensional.

  *: Last time was about as pedantic as correcting someone who calls all animals “dogs”.

• [westbywest]

  I believe the Siamese Cup would be better named the Quato Cup. Then I might buy it, despite being broke.

• [Anonymous]

  Wikipedants

• [tubacat]

  Adding a slight bit of topological pedantry – the cup (or any similar 3-dimensional shape) is actually just a model of a Klein bottle, since in a true Klein bottle, the handle has to connect with the rim (from the inside) without breaking the surface (no holes)…