Tag Archives: jewelry

Top 10 Countdown: Most Popular 3D Printing Stories in September 2012

Cross Necklace 3D Printing Celebrities

Here are the top 10 most popular stories On 3D Printing brought you in September 2012.

10. Interview: Protos Eyewear Combines Fashion, Tech, and 3D Printing

9. The Variable Cross: Create Your Own 3D Printed Cross Pendant Necklace

8. Unique 3D Printed Art Featured at the 3D Print Show in London

7. 3D Printing Mobile Labs: A New Combat Strategy for the U.S. Military

6. 3D Printing iPhones in America: Disrupting Foxconn’s Assembly Line

5. 3D Printing Will Be As Disruptive As the PC, Thanks to Piracy

4. Could 3D Printing Save the Public Library System? Mixed Opinions

3. 3D Printing on the Horizon: Can You Spot the Trend?

2. Interview: Idle Print Looks to Monetize Spare Cycles in 3D Printing

1. 3D Printing a Futuristic Airplane Cabin: Innovation at Airbus

 

Thanks for reading in September!

 

The Variable Cross: Create Your Own 3D Printed Cross Pendant Necklace

Cross Necklace 3D Printing Celebrities

From Madonna to Katy Perry to the Duchess of Cambridge Princess Kate, celebrities are wearing cross pendant necklaces of all different shapes and designs. The trend is hot and there are many to buy online, but what if you wanted to design your own? Now you can.

The Variable Cross is a pendant that you can customize through a webpage in 3D. The website uses brand new WebGL technology (works best in Chrome). Once you create your design, it is 3D printed in sterling silver. This is the service first to offer you the tools to create your own jewelry in precious metals using 3D printing. And all without needing any special skills.

Variable Cross 3D Printing

Go to the website to try it yourself: http://cross.shapewright.com

The Variable Cross was created by an artist who calls himself macouno. Here’s his bio.

I’m an artist, who has been working with new/3D technology for well over a decade. Find out more about me and my work at http://www.macouno.com. The last couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with 3D print and related developments. Most notably perhaps the Entoforms (http://www.entoforms.com).

Variable Cross Designs 3D Printing

Top 3D Printing Headlines Last Week: HP and Stratasys, Olympics, Toys

HP CEO Meg Whitman

A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from July 30 to August 5.

Monday, July 30

Tuesday, July 31

Wednesday, August 1

Thursday, August 2

Friday, August 3

Saturday, August 4

Sunday, August 5

 

HP CEO Meg Whitman photo by TechShowNetwork used under Creative Commons license.

3D Printed Fractal Art Turned Into Beautiful Jewelry and Sculptures

3D Printed Fractal Art by unellenu

We are always on the hunt for designers who are using 3D printing to make things more that are more beautiful or exquisite than can be made by  traditional means, and wow did we find one.

Designer unellenu has an innovative approach to creating 3D printed designs. 3D fractal art is used as the source for models, sculptures, homewares and jewellery. The result is truly unique.

unellenu has shops on Shapeways, i.materialise, and Etsy. Designs ready to 3D print are priced at less than $15 while others are priced up to $1000. We are impressed by the blend of mathematics and aesthetics in these products.

unellenu Candle Shade

unellenu Hair Ornament

unellenu Jewelry

America Will Lead the Future of Manufacturing, China Will Follow

Made in the USA 3D Printing

In a fantastic opinion piece by technology entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa, the case is made that America will be the center of manufacturing, not China. This won’t happen through increasing Chinese labor costs or monetary policy, but through American innovation in technology. Specific innovations cited include robotics, AI, 3D printing, and nanotechnology.

Below are Wadhwa’s thoughts on 3D printing:

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is now making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products. In conventional manufacturing, parts are produced by humans using power-driven machine tools, such as saws, lathes, milling machines, and drill presses, to physically remove material until you’re left with the shape desired. This is a cumbersome process that becomes more difficult and time-consuming with increasing complexity. In other words, the more complex the product you want to create, the more labor is required and the greater the effort.

In additive manufacturing, parts are produced by melting successive layers of materials based on three-dimensional models — adding materials rather than subtracting them. The ”3D printers” that produce these parts use powered metal, droplets of plastic, and other materials — much like the toner cartridges that go into laser printers. This allows the creation of objects without any sort of tools or fixtures. The process doesn’t produce any waste material, and there is no additional cost for complexity. Just as, thanks to laser printers, a page filled with graphics doesn’t cost much more than one with text (other than the cost of toner), with 3D printers we can print a sophisticated 3D structure for what it would cost to print something simple.

Three-D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implantsjewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1,000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that, in the next decade, manufacturing will again become a local industry and it will be possible to 3D print electronics and use giant 3D printing scaffolds to print entire buildings. Why would we ship raw materials all the way to China and then ship completed products back to the United States when they can be manufactured more cheaply locally, on demand?

Vivek Wadhwa Singularity 3D Printing

 

Read the full article at foreignpolicy.com.

American flag photo by Loving Earth used under Creative Commons license.

Vivek Wadhwa photo by BAIA used under Creative Commons license.