Twisty puzzle superstar Oskar van Deventer has done it again with the 3D printed Cheese Block puzzle. A deceptively simple concept that quickly starts to look harder and harder to solve. Oskar has been designing 3D printed twisty puzzles since 1978 including the Over the Top Cube which is now in the Guinness Book of records as the highest order Rubik's cube. Order 3D-printed do-it-yourself puzzle kits from Shapeways or contact Oskar directly if you want to buy a fully dyed, assembled and stickered puzzle.
Many complained that iphone cases out there are really hard to put on and take off. Horror stories; girls breaking their nails, guys getting really mad and slamming their phones, just, really crazy stuff. So I decided to put an end to this madness by inventing an extremely simple way to fit the case around your iphone 5.
We were happy to have Joshua Harker visit us at the Shapeways HQ in New York City to finally meet after 3D printing SO MANY of his skulls. We took the opportunity to record our part of our conversation about how he used Shapeways 3d printing and Kickstarter to take his career into a new direction, how on demand 3D printing makes it possible for artists and designers to realize their ideas, and how platforms like Shapeways and Kickstarter make it possible to reach a massive audience with no financial investment or risk. In short, 3D printing and the 3rd industrial revolution as celebrated by his latest Kickstarter project, Anatomica di Revolutis.
The full interview runs for around 15 minutes and covers much of Joshua's amazing success over the past 12 months, check it out.
We do not always know exactly what everyone is 3D printing with Shapeways, Every now and then we see some odd forms coming out of the 3D printers and we speculate what they might be. A sliding bracket to connect a camera to a dog, a rolling half mount to amplify bird calls, or a weirdly flapping crawler to take flight over Japan? Check out the videos of the ornithopter that was modeled in Autodesk 123D and 3D printed with Shapeways as it is first tested, then launched into outdoor flight. If anyone understands Japanese and would like to translate the site, please feel free to share more information on the project.
Take a look at this really interesting video of an experiment to seal Shapeways 3D printed Nylon with super glue and acetone.
Shapeways community member and Twisty Puzzles Forum member Brandon Enright has shared a really interesting video on YouTube of his experiment to seal a Shapeways Nylon (WSF) 3D print with a mixture of Cyanoacrylate (Super Glue) diluted with Acetone. His experiments show that the mixture quickly penetrates and seals the surface of the nylon giving a glossy texture that is considerably more resistant to getting dirty when tested with tiny particles of copper powder. When compared to unfinished nylon parts there was a massive difference. This is a well documented experiment that is showing some very promising results and we are really looking forward to seeing more results. We also know that people are using floor polish to get a similar effect but you may need to be careful the formulation you use does not yellow over time.
What post processing experiments have you tried on your Shapeways 3D prints? We would love to see more videos of your results.
Check out the video and the description from the Triple Gear product page on Shapeways.
In this unusual mechanism three gears mesh together in pairs, and yet they can turn!
If you take three ordinary gears and put them together so that each
gear meshes with the other two, then none of the gears can turn because
neighbouring gears must turn in opposite directions. Triple gear avoids
this problem by having the three "gears" arranged like linked rings -
the gears then rotate along skew axes, and the opposite direction rule
no longer applies (although see also Oskar van Deventer's Magic Gears for another possible solution).
This is joint work with Saul Schleimer. We were inspired by another of Oskar's designs, his Knotted Gear,
which consists of two linked rings that gear with each other, and of
course we wondered if it would be possible to do three linked rings!
Shapeways is a 3D Printing marketplace and community.
