I finished printing all the plastic parts needed to build a Prusa Mendel. Also a box of hardware and motors I ordered from Mixshop arrived so I was able to start assembling. I decided to print all the plastic parts with 30% infill except the pulleys and gears which I did at 50% infill. I…
I spent the past weekend up in Squamish, BC for the 2011 Live at Squamish Music Festival. Here’s some of my favorite photos from the two day festival of outdoor concerts. Day One Emily Haines and James Shaw of Metric did an acoustic set: a view from the busy photo pit: then Vancouver’s own Hey…
As part of my continuing adventures with a 3D printer, my next project is printing an actual 3D printer, the opensource Prusa Mendel, a Reprap derivative. Well, printing a good portion of it anyways. Aside from a larger build platform which utilizes a slightly different way of printing from my MakerBot (both the extruder and…
A while back, I participated in my first Kickstarter project by ‘funding’ something called a Gameduino: It’s an add on module (aka a shield) for the Arduino hardware platform. It basically gives the Arduino the missing bits of electronics to be a self contained 8-bit videogame platform including VGA and sound ports to connect to…
The other day, Thingiverse member Bmoshe posted this awesome 3D model of Yoda. Easily the highest resolution model I’ve printed so far on my MakerBot coming in at a whopping 147mb (versus 1-5mb for a complex model on average). It took forever to render the toolpath in Replicator G but was worth it! It took…
Last month, I was invited by GM Canada up to Alaska to try out the 2011 Chevy Volt ahead of the Canadian launch happening this fall. My first encounter with the Volt was during the 2010 Winter Olympics when I got to drive a pre-production model on a test track. Earlier this year, I also…
I stumbled across this clever animated short film called FULL PRINTED about how 3D printing is useful as well as a potential future of this technology. FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.
I don’t often watch the fireworks from the beach, but thanks to some free tickets, I was able to view them from the bleachers at English Bay. We showed up just before the show started thanks to assigned seating and got out of there as soon as it was over easily. Since I had a…
Recently I printed Stephen Colbert’s head on my MakerBot (in ‘John Boehner orange’ as someone in the comments on Flickr pointed out): and made a timelapse of the nearly 2 hour print process: and then Cory Doctorow blogged about it on BoingBoing.net (thanks to Darren for submitting it). Which then lead to my “A few…
I’ve had my MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D printer up and running for a few weeks now and thought I’d document some of the things that I’ve learned during this process. Hopefully these items will help someone else who’s interested in the world of 3D printing. Keep in mind these thoughts are based on my experience assembling…