A reminder that as of October 1st 8am EST the new pricing schedule will go into effect for materials and shipping.

Along with the changes in pricing we are also introducing shipping costs.

Shipping Cost as of October 1st

• United States, Canada and The Netherlands: $6.50
• EU Countries: $9.50
• Rest of the World: $19.99 

If you have any feedback please let us know in the comments here or in the forum.

Whilst reading a blog post by Seth Godin entitled The forever recession (and the coming revolution) with the line "When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory" it reminded me of the book 'Makers' by Cory Doctorow and in turn of the potential of Shapeways 3D Printing as New Work.

Seth's post looks at the current employment recession as a long term revolution, where "The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created."  This echoes elements of Cory's Makers where an economic and employment revolution happens thanks in part to product hacks, access to 3D printing and internet notoriety.

If we look at the potential of Shapeways online 3D printing in the context of these visions which speak of 'employment' in terms of a series of projects you just do, whether they be self initiated, collaborations or by consultation for cash, a factory plugged into your laptop is an incredibly powerful asset.

Take a moment to read Seth's post, set aside some time to read Makers which you can download for free in various formats and prepare yourself for New Work.

Copeland-Chatterson Company, loose-leaf systems factory composing room, Brampton, Ontario ca. 1905 By Toronto Public Library Special Collections

This tutorial is for those with a bit of HTML prowess and want to use the Shapeways Shopping Cart to sell your 3D prints from your own external shop.  Plugging into the Shapeways API it offer levels of customization and complexity not possible with the Shapeways Widget.

Take a look at the tutorial, experiment with your own website, share your examples and let us know if this is something you would like integrated into your Shapeways Shop to sell your own 3D printed designs?

By Universal Joint Design via Carl Rodenberg under Felix Klein.

There are plenty of amazing math models 3D printed by the Shapeways community that I like but do not fully understand but none seem to be hurting my head with weirdness quite as much as the recent series printed by Universal Joint Design.

The models presented on Shapeways are recreations of a Classical Mathematical Model Collection originally made by hand in plaster in the 1800's. This portion of the collection was originally modelled by Carl Rodenberg under the direction of the famous mathematician Felix Klein. 

The main portion of this research involved recreating a series of 24 cubic surfaces which demonstrate types of singularities possible on a cubic surface. In topology, singularities are opposed to smooth surfaces in that they demonstrate abrupt changes in curvature at their surface. 

The guys at Makerbot are running full steam ahead with improvements to their machines and with the latest Mk7 extruder they are outputting really nice quality 3D prints. Makers of commercial FDM 3D printers lookout.

In July last year we used our Mk4 Makerbot to print Baroba's Bowie the Bunny with some fair results, but the latest as shown on the Makerbot blog are looking really nice.

A big congratulations to the entire team at Makerbot for the constant improvements, the recent funding and to Bre for his latest 3D Printcess.

Rock on. 

Want to make your own soaps with 3D printing, the perfect personalized gift? Take a look how Fredrik Perman of the Product Farm and his girlfriend used 3D printing to make his own Pawfect Suds.

The Pawfect Suds paw print shape for our silicone mold finally arrived from Shapeways! We’re really excited to get some OOMOO silicone compound and start experimenting with making actual “negative” silicone molds from this “positive” soap shape.

Check out the amazing finish on these stainless steel and sterling silver 3D prints by Larry Williams aka THE1REBEL aka Nexus Studios.

Techniques used include the inlay of holographic carbon fiber, clear and colored resins, melted plastic an hand polishing. Take a look at his forum post for more details on the materials, tools and processes used.

Here at Shapeways we've been making huge improvements to our packaging process, and we're getting ready to go live. We realize right now the products are are coming in pretty intense packaging.  There's the crime scene tape, the scotch tape, the bubble bags, the poly bags, and the multicolored peanuts. It's a regular fiesta in a box.

We'll be starting incrementally with 25% of your orders going in brand spanking new air fill wrap. Peanuts be gone. In the coming weeks you'll be seeing a myriad of other changes  - I won't ruin the surprise! Just know it's coming, it's coming fast, and we couldn't be more excited. Aesthetics aside, our redesign is 100% environmentally friendly. We're doing everything and anything we can to make sure your product reaches you safely, unbroken, and hand in hand with the environment.

Nice video of Shapeways community member Farah Bandookwala, previously mentioned on the Shapeways Blog shows her use of haptics to 3D model her designs for 3D printing.  

The Art & Science of Touch from Siri Rodnes on Vimeo.

 

A quick video to show how you can design your own ring with ShapeWright to have it 3D printed in your choice of materials by Shapeways. Further awesomeness plugging into the Shapeways API.



Developed by macouno aka Dolf Veenvliet

Well it seems the Objet printers we use for Black, White and Transparent detail are now capable of printing Bio-Compatible Materials..

Objet Bio-Compatible material (MED610™) is a rigid material featuring great dimensional stability and colorless transparency. The material is ideal for applications requiring prolonged skin contact of over 30 days and short term mucosal-membrane contact of up to 24 hours. Objet Bio-Compatible material has 5 medical approvals including Cytotoxicity, Genotoxicity, Delayed Type Hypersensitivity, Irritation and USP Plastic Class VI*

 

As you can imagine the cleaning process of the machines and parts is quite intensive to ensure all toxic nastiness is removed from machines and prints, but still kinda cool... So, what would YOU do if you had access to this material? 

The Shapeways development, engineering and UX teams have been working to make the Shapeways site better for makers, sellers and buyers.  We have taken into account your feedback on the recent product page update and will continue to hone the page to make using Shapeways fast, intuitive and fun.  

We will be entering a phase of continuous change on the Shapeways website as we push really hard to bring the entire site up to the level of usability needed.  We want to make the site as awesome as the service. We will try and keep you informed of major changes before they go live, but changes at lower levels will need to be put into place continuously. Please continue to give us feedback in the forums as we push these features live so we can continue to make the site work for makers, shop owners and buyers.

We will be putting into place a formal system for your feedback outside of the regular forums so that we can better track, rank and implement your feedback, we will give you more information as it goes live.

Some of the 41 fixes going live in the next update include: 

• Bug UX, UI, IE8 display/layout issues
• Shop section functionality on product details page
• HTML characters in model title now correctly shown
• Not for sale items show true value to shopper
• edit description field show complete description
• Remember currency ($ or €) selection
• Fix the product description section
• Fix presentation/layout for comment section
• Add functionality to remove a model
• analytics tracking code on model pages
• Small browser window horizontal scrollbar
• Remember last state on Product Detail page—either Edit or View—for logged in accounts

Australian TV show Catalyst heads all the way to Bath UK to talk 3D Printing with Dr. Adrian Bowyer, father of RepRap.

It's been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the planet. Maybe a slight exaggeration - but there's no doubt the world will be very different when every one of us has a 3D printer......

Watch the video here or download for archiving.

Continuing the business strategy of broad acquisition, 3D Systems has now bought Australian based rapid prototyping service Formero and with that XYZ Innovation. 

Unlike previous acquisitions, 3D systems has chosen this time to rebrand the businesses as 3D systems Asia-Pacific, making it abundantly clear with a 'Who was Formero?' tagline on the XYZ Innovation site..

Will this mean cheaper, faster 3D printing in Australia? Will XYZ continue to sell MTT SLM machines or will it become a 3D Systems only ecosystem? Will the company formerly known as Formero still provide Objet, FDM and EOS 3D printing services?