This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.
Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him. He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic. For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.
You can still see the faceting on one end that was a result of my not creating my model at a high enough resolution. I could have smoothed that out with enough filling and sanding, but didn’t want to bother. It’s only a soap dish after all. An indestructible soap dish.
Until I saw Ian’s finished product, I had no idea just how good a MakerBot printed object could look. You can bet I’m going to use this process in the very near future.
Awesome. The amazing Unfold has come up with a contraption that lets folks sculpt virtual pottery! Very cool!
For L’Artisan Electronique, Unfold created -aside from the ceramic printer- a virtual pottery wheel in collaboration with Tim Knapen. This pottery wheel gives visitors a chance to ‘turn’ their own forms. Every time a visitor presses “Save” on the arcade buttons, the creation is saved to disk and displayed on the wall. At regular intervals, a selection of these designs is printed in clay using a modified REPRAP machine and exhibited in the space.
The virtual pottery interface uses openFrameworks with openCV to track visitors’ hand positions in the air. There are two parts to the scan, one being the green laser projecting lines onto the hand and camera recording the deformations to the line created by the hand. The curvature recorded is used as a cylinder deformer.
Check out our Fail Force test rig at the MakerBot R&D lab- We test out the maximum push strength of the new MK5 Drive Gear! Watch the results in real time!
Hi Everybody- Some good news for all you people who love printing in color on the CupCake CNC! You can now get our full selection of colors in 1 pound rolls! We know that some people just don’t love red, or blue, as much as they love yellow, so now you don’t have to deprive yourself ever again! Buy all the colors, and then round it out with a 1 pound or 5 pound roll of delicious looking PINK ABS. For the first week we are also offering a special reduced price to get them out to you on the cheap!
No longer will your prints be thwarted by the evil incarnation of plastic physics: CURLING! Curling happens when layer upon layer of plastic cools down on top of each other and shrinks a small percent. This shrinkage builds up layer after layer and the edges of the printed object start to curl up! The heated build platform greatly reduces curling by keeping the temperature of the base of the object at a steady 110C.
Full instructions are on the MakerBot wiki. We’re open source and we believe in keeping designs open so you can hack on them! Check out the designs on Thingiverse. We are also going to try something new with this project. We’re going to use our forums for community discussion on this project. Here’s the forum for this project.
Big thanks to Jordan Miller for his early support and research into heated build platforms. Thanks also to Nophead for his pioneering research into heated platforms and his work identifying appropriate materials to for printing on.
Special price of $42 until 3/29 when the price goes up to $50!
NOTE: We have started putting kits together now and will be able to ship them next week (The week of March 29). If you order more than the heated build platform, your shipment will be shipped when kit assembly is complete next week!
Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!
I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.
There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!
Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!
Nick Ames put a great photo on Flickr that really lays out the law with good rafting!
The left and right edges of the raft are good and will form a strong but easy to remove bond between the object and the build platform. The section in the middle is squished and will stick securely to the platform when nothing else will.
