Dishwasher

Thank you Ryan for designing and printing these dishwasher rings! My dishes are so much cleaner now! No need to call the manufacturer or make a trip to Home Depot. These parts were designed and printed in less than half an hour. Another awesome 3D printing job (one of my other favorites was the air conditioning knob in my car. Wish I had a picture of that on hand).

Photo of the Day: Sneek Peek

Here's a glimpse of a printer that is being designed and built by Ryan. He's been working on it for several months now. This is at least the third or fourth iteration of the design. It is being beta tested at a nearby hacker space.

Stay tuned for future updates on our in-house printer.

Photo of the Day: Saving the Strawberry Sunglasses

These beloved sunglasses were saved after we designed and printed a new earpiece. After a few unsuccessful attempts to locate a new pair we decided to use our CAD skills and 3D printer (which makes for a much better story)!

Ryan measured the broken part with a digital micrometer and then imported the file into Rhino to do the design work.

Update: 3D printing eyewear to fit your face is apparently a thing. Who knew.

Innovative Ticks and Tocks

For us 3D printing started as a hobby. It has led to an opportunity to share our skills with a broader audience and start a small business.  A lot of reward still involves stretching some creative muscles. 

Our most recent project used the amazing Omnomnom creator by jetty.  This OSX software is a great way to convert 2D images into 3D models.  It works with OpenSCAD to automate what would otherwise be a tedious process of taking an image and figuring out how to model it.

This combined with our love of the Geek and Sundry show, the Flog, is why we choose the sihouette in their show title to model.  We've also been kicking around the idea of a printed clock.  Once the 2D image was processed, some editing was done to get where we wanted.  The model was split for dualstrusion printing and the bottom half enlarged to have room for some cheap clock parts (luckily these are a commodity).  Finally a rough version of the clock parts was used to hollow out the model.

Amazingly the final version printed great on the first try in ABS (we experimented with a couple of smaller versions).  This may be the largest single part we've done, in surface area at least. Because of the cut out for the clock there was very little warping.

We sent one to the Geek and Sundry office and they were hanging it up.  I'd like to get an OK from them to upload the clock since it is a derivative of their really awesome image (it made a great transition to 3D, Check out the intros to The Flog shows as well).  If that happens it will be on thingiverse for people to try out.