We have a banner stand that is starting to fail at work. The plastic collar is starting to crack. Rather than simply replacing the whole stand, I figured I could make a quick replacement clamp. 10 minutes later thanks to TinkerCAD we have our replacement part model.

Once the stand was disassembled, I  switched out and replaced the collar. It’s a bit brighter than the stock part, but the stand is repaired!

Once I saw how easy it was to create models in TinkerCad, I decided to get caught up with some of our other needs. This is a replacement clip for a hanging banner.

The original clip slides into a channel, the replacement slid right in!

I’ve been wanting to print some of the geared items on Thingiverse for a while. With Valentines day coming up it seemed like an excellent opportunity to try out the Screwless Heart Gears by Thingiverse user Emmett. After reading the assembly instructions the heart came together quite nicely with the help of a hot air gun to help let the printed pins slide in easily.

Completed!

The heart has been assembled and rotated

A view from the top

I found it easier to assemble the larger gears first. It allowed me to better align and mesh the smaller gears.

Working my way down

The top 2 lobes of the heart

The assembly process begins!

Printing one of the 8 gears

Dan's Rep rap Prusa 3d Printer

I get a lot of blank stares and strange looks when I tell people that I am working on a 3D printer. As such I’d like to set out to explain what one is as well as show off what I’ve completed on mine thus far.

So you ask, “What exactly is one of them there 3-Dee printer things you’re talking about?” In short, it is a rapid prototyping machine. Since I’m sure that clears it all up and removes any further questions you have in your mind, I’m done here and everyone’s good to move on to the next blog right? No of course not. The best explanation I have is it’s a machine that takes a plastic material, melts it down, and places a thin layer of the melted plastic one layer at a time until you have a finished object. It is a printer that works like your old school inkjet printer but also moves on a 3rd axis to make non flat prints.

Claudio's RepRap Prusa

The idea is as follows. What do you do when you want to develop some brand new, earth shattering, world stopping, sign of the apocalypse product that has never been in existence before and it needs a custom part that even Nostradamus didn’t predict? You design it of course, in your favorite 3D modeling software like Google Sketchup or Blender or any of the other dozens that are out there. The show stopper before was how you went from a digital model to something tangible that you could hold in your hands and break if you are one of those accident prone individuals. It always meant that you had to go pay some exorbitant amount for a machine shop to make you just one of that item, and heaven forbid that item didn’t fit the needs on the first round. I’m sure you can imagine where the price would go up rather quickly in development. So why not just make it out of cheaper material and something that works just well enough to serve as a proof of concept. Well, that’s exactly what the 3D printer does for you.

A handful of months ago two of the other members at our hackerspace and myself all decided we wanted to build our own Prusa 3D printers. No real defined reason behind it other than we knew we wanted our own printers, and that if we had one it would open new possibilities to us. Since there is no real completion point for these things, it would simply be that once we had it “working” we could use it to create new items and repair or replace old ones that were no longer available. That in a nutshell is the appeal of having such a device and the driving force behind our continued development of them. One of the single most awesome things about this particular printer that we are building, the Prusa. Is that it’s relatively cheap, easily reproducible, modular, and upgradeable. Currently we are in the process of getting them fine tuned and working to some extent. From there we’ll be able to spend further time using it to upgrade itself and improve it’s quality. Expect to see more details in the near future right here on my very own blog enlightening all of the saga of blood, sweat, tears, cursing, and agony that is the way of life a homemade 3D prototyping machine is.

This past weekend Sonny and Nick had their Makerbot 3D Printers up at the space. Sonny showed off his by printing a part used for the Mendel 3d printer in glow in the dark ABS plastic. Claudio and Daniel are in the process of building their own Mendel 3d printers. Once everything is built and working we should have 4-5 3d printers among the group! If you’re interested in learning more about these printers or how to get started in building your own, come out to a meeting and strike up a conversation with one of our many members active in these projects!

Claudio – Sonny working on makerbots

Makerbot 3d Printers

Printing Space Invaders

Finished Space Invader