Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm • 
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A fanciful post to Thingiverse from 3DTOPO allows you to print out your own version of Arthur Ganson sculpture Machine with Concrete , a system of wormgears that produces a gear-ratio of 244.14 quintillion to 1.
This is a printable version of Machine with Concrete. The sculpture is a series of twelve 1:50 worm gears, with each gear reducing 1/50th of the previous gear. With 12 gears, the final gear ratio is a mind boggling 244,140,625,000,000,000,000 : 1 (244.14 quintillion to 1). With the first gear spinning at 200RPM it would take over 2 TRILLION years for a single revolution at the end of the machine, so the final drive shaft can be embedded in concrete or plaster.
I emailed Arthur Ganson a link to this page and he replied "looks FANTASTIC!".
Printed Machine with Concrete
(via JWZ)
Cory Doctorow at 7:05 pm • •
RealAbsurdity's "Modular Snap-Fit Airship" on Thingiverse is a 3D-printable toy whose parts can interchangeably form part of a Saturn V rocket. More snap-fit vehicles are planned.
This is a fully modular snap-fit (no glue required) model of an Airship. It is the vanilla base for a series of absurd mashups that currently includes a Trireme and a Saturn V rocket. Designed for 3D print, it comes in two flavors: solid and shell.
Modular Snap-Fit Airship
(Thanks, crystlem!)
Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm • •
A couple of weeks ago, the nice folks at Sample and Hold asked me if I'd like to drop into their east London studio to get my head 3D scanned. Not long after, my daughter's school shut for a professional development day, so I took the opportunity to bring us both down to Dalston for a 3D scanning adventure.
What followed was the most cyberpunk experience of my life, straight out of a William Gibson Sprawl novel. The Sample and Hold studio is at the bottom of a vibrant market where hand-lettered signs offer cheap money-wiring to Ghana and Nigeria amid stalls with huge displays of fresh fish on ice, dotted with more stalls selling astoundingly off-model cheap toy knockoffs -- Dora the Explorer toys that look like they cast from molds sculpted by someone who was working from a description conveyed over a crackling phone-conversation, Transformer robots that turn into random kitchen appliances and stylized skulls, logoed tees whose Disney characters look like they spent a turn in a toaster oven.
Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 9:41 am • •
These pieces were printed on a Makerbot Replicator 2 3D printer, by artist Cosmo Wenman, who printed them in several pieces and then assembled them. MakerBot is justifiably proud of these extraordinary achievements, which have really pushed the limits on 3D printing using low-cost, home-model printers. Here's some of Wenman's description of his thoughts behind Head of a Horse of Selene (a replica of a piece in the British Museum), on Thingiverse:
I find David Hockney's theories on the precocious use of lenses in Renaissance art very compelling. But living with this damned horse on my screen, and then in my house, for the last two months, it's hard to imagine how the original could have been designed two millenia ago without photography, let alone lenses. Its expression is so exacting, just an instant in time, I can't see how it could be modeled by eye from a live horse, or even a dead one. Maybe a contour gauge on a carcass with rigor mortis, but I don't see that either, not with this expressiveness and movement.
I imagine a Greek guy walking around 2,000 years ago with a camera obscura with some kind of light sensitive papyrus inside, trying to raise funds to get his light enscribing machine into mass production. Alas, there was no Kickstarter back then.
Or, maybe the artist and horse in bright sunlight, the artist covering his eyes. The horse's handler startles it into motion, and the artist opens his eyes for an instant, closes them again, then draws quickly with his eyes shut while the image fades in his retinas - the lens, film, and darkroom being his eyes... I dunno - either that or weeks of careful study, scores of sketches of impressions of a horse in motion, composited into this exacting model. But that doesn't sound like as much fun.
Cosmo Wenman’s Mind-Blowing Sculpture Made On A MakerBot
Xeni Jardin at 10:25 am • •
"kongrorilla" created this nifty design for a Low-Poly Mask for Halloween 2012. Download it from Thingiverse and make your own. Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 1:31 pm • •
If you've got access to a 3D printer, you can download and print a "Pocket Dungeons" set, created by Thingiverse user dutchmogul, who calls it "a modular, competitive dungeon-crawl for two to six players."
With modular, tile-based board design and randomized events, no two games will be alike. Dynamic, tactical game play allows for quick resolution as players control treasure-hungry dungeon delvers vying for gold and glory.
This game has been designed with Pocket-Tactics in mind and the pieces and rules sets will be able to cross over and expand the depth of each range.
The MakerBot blog explains, "This totally modular set was designed in TinkerCAD, a free online and easy to use CAD website that allows you to share directly to Thingiverse. What I like about this little set is that I could see myself having as much, or even more, fun putting together a dungeon layout as I would have playing the game itself."
Pocket-Dungeons
Cory Doctorow at 5:48 pm • •
Popular Science's John Robb reports on a person who claims that his 3D-printed pistol can successfully fire live ammunition, though not with total reliability. The same person then went on to print a working AR-15 rifle (this is a substantial advance on last year's account of a 3D printable AR-15 automatic conversion kit. This event has raised something of a crisis for Thingiverse, the online repository for 3D printable meshes, which is contemplating whether it will host files that can be printed into "weapons."
An amateur gunsmith, operating under the handle of "HaveBlue" (incidentally, "Have Blue" is the codename that was used for the prototype stealth fighter that became the Lockheed F-117), announced recently in online forums that he had successfully printed a serviceable .22 caliber pistol.
Despite predictions of disaster, the pistol worked. It successfully fired 200 rounds in testing.
HaveBlue then decided to push the limits of what was possible and use his printer to make an AR-15 rifle. To do this, he downloaded plans for an AR-15 in the Solidworks file format from a site called CNCGunsmith.com. After some small modifications to the design, he fed about $30 of ABS plastic feedstock into his late-model Stratasys printer. The result was a functional AR-15 rifle. Early testing shows that it works, although it still has some minor feed and extraction problems to be worked out.
A Working Assault Rifle Made With a 3-D Printer
Cory Doctorow at 8:00 pm • •
Nick sez, "I designed and laser cut a new women's room sign for my hackerspace (CCCKC/Hammerspace). The files are up on thinigiverse if anyone wants to make their own. It took a long time to figure out something that wasn't a dress to signify that a stick figure is a women. Down pigtails seem to do the job nicely and I noticed that Jackhammer Jill has them as well."
Womens Room Sign Welder
(Thanks, Nick!)
Cory Doctorow at 5:57 am • •
Thingiverse user Krest has posted a file to help you print your own scale armor on your MakerBot or other 3D printer: "Print, paint, and tie together, that's it."
Although Krest’s shoulder scale armor uses leather cords which can be adjusted for fit, I think it would be really interesting to use an elastic cord so that the armor could bend and flex. While not nearly as authentic, it would also be interesting to use loops on the inside of each scale instead of holes which might allow for a seamless appearing exterior.
Awesome Scale Armor by Krest
Cory Doctorow at 10:28 am • •
Golan sez, "The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet, or unmeetable, by corporate interests."
F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests.
The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer).
OK, that's pretty badass right there.
The Free Universal Construction Kit
Cory Doctorow at 2:26 pm • •
Max Lupo's Thingiverse archive contains all the parts necessary to allow three people to slowly type one phrase over and over again on a typewriter, by operating a complex machine called "the convenient typer."
This is an apparatus designed to allow three people to conveniently type out a specific phrase: it is as it is
Each person must time their actions specifically, and operate their portion of the device with care.
This device was made to be a performance at a local art-event. Its operation is (of course) far from convenient, but it does type out the most true thing I have ever known.
The Convenient Typer
Cory Doctorow at 8:59 am • •
T4obrien has uploaded files to create a laser-cut cardboard Tardis to Thingiverse:
This detailed and thoughtfully laid out laser-cuttable cardboard version of a TARDIS by t4obrien totally qualifies as awesome. I don’t own a laser cutter, but I just found the perfect excuse for buying one. And, if you don’t glue the pieces together, you could open it up so that it is larger on the inside…
