Tag Archives: materials
3D Printing Startup Mixee Labs Launches Customizable 3D Printed Cufflinks
Mixee Labs Launches 3D Printed Cufflinks
Mixee Labs is the 3D printing startup behind customizable figurine platform Mixee Me and a customizable jewelry platform launched in June. Mixee Labs’ products were featured as Time Magazine’s Top 10 3D Printed Gifts of the year in 2012.
Now Mixee Labs has a new product: 3D printed cufflinks.
Using Mixee Labs, anybody can design their own cufflinks. You can select from a variety of different designs or even upload your own black and white graphic. Want cufflinks of your favorite team logo or your initials? Mixee Lab’s custom cufflink creator is perfect for you.
Mixee Labs manufactures each product on demand using 3D printed stainless steel (with optional gold or bronze plating) for $60, 3D printed sterling silver for $160, and 3D printed nylon plastic for $20.
3D printing is not limited to plastics, and Mixee Labs is taking full advantage of the wide variety of materials with this product. Each stainless steel or plastic pair will take about 2 weeks to print and ship; each silver pair will take about 3 weeks to ship.
Here’s a photo gallery to show how the creation process works and showcases some final cufflink designs.
We sat down with Nancy Yi Liang, co-founder of Mixee Labs for an interview.
On 3D Printing: First figurines, then jewelry, now cufflinks. Seems like you are building a full catalog of 3D printed goods. Tell us more about your expansion strategy.
Nancy Yi Liang: Eventually, we want to be a destination for customized, rapidly manufactured products. The cufflinks are built with our modeler’s platform (not yet released). The idea is you can upload a base model STL, like a cufflink, and specify a given surface for the user to add embellishments via extruded text or graphics. Unlike the Javascript platform we launched a while back, this platform doesn’t require a designer to know how to code.
On 3D Printing: These cufflinks are in stainless steel, right? What have you learned about working with that material?
Nancy Yi Liang: Stainless Steel is a great material–it has a real vintage-looking, raw quality to it. Moreover, you can coat it with gold and bronze, giving it some polish. A big part of designing for Stainless Steel is understanding structural strength. There’s a part of the 3d printing process (called the “greenstate”) where the model is not yet infused with bronze, and is actually quite fragile. During this stage, any thin parts of the model that is not well supported can break. In general, designing for 3d printing is very much about understanding the production process. “3d printing” actually covers a wide variety of production techniques (laser sintering, powder binding layer by layer with glue, jets extruding molten plastic). Each material employes different techniques and thus have different design restrictions. Shapeways provides excellent guides on designing for each material (hehe.. patting myself on the back a little since I wrote that section back when I was at Shapeways).
On 3D Printing: What’s been the biggest surprise about 3D printing jewelry and accessories?
Nancy Yi Liang: You know, sometimes people just want to put their names on things. I originally designed this with the mindset that people will want to upload all sorts of fancy graphics. But when I asked my friends who wear cufflinks, a lot of them got very excited when I told them that they can put their initials on the product. So ok, we added a custom text field to the cufflink creator. Right now, we are just beginning to venture into this space, so I’m sure there’s a lot more surprises coming down the road–we just need to keep our eyes and ears sharp!
Go to Mixee Labs to create your own custom cufflinks or other 3D printed jewelry.
i.Materialise Launches 3D Printing Design Challenge for Ceramics
3D Printing Design Ceramics Challenge from i.Materialise
3D printing marketplace i.Materialise has launched its latest 3D printing design challenge. This challenge asks for innovative ideas for ceramics.
Running April 8 to May 23, 2013, the competition asks entrants to submit a design on i.Materialise and the winner will get a free 3D print of their design.
Here are more details about the i.Materialise 3D Printing Ceramics Challenge.
Spring is finally entering our doors and we are in desperate need for more colors in our lives! So we’re ready to launch our first ceramics challenge where you can choose between nine vibrant colors. Are you ready?
THE CHALLENGE
For this competition, your challenge is to use 3D printing to create a product in ceramics. We give you carte blanche, so you can design anything you want: from tiles to vases, from jewelry to kitchen ware.
Surprise us by your creativity!
PRIZES
On the 23th of May the jury will select 1 winning design. The winner will receive his or her 3D print.
WHO CAN ENTER
This challenge is open to all designers, professional and amateur, regardless of sex, age or nationality.
CHALLENGE PERIOD
Submissions will be accepted up to 23:59 May 23th Central European Time, 2013.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
There is no limit on the number of entries per contestant. To enter, you need to upload your design(s) here and provide a clear explanation (under ‘desciption’) in at least 50 words.
JURY
The i.materialise team will vote upon the entries.
MATERIAL & BOUNDING BOX
Participants need to upload their file here. You can find more information about the file formats in our FAQs under ‘website’. The material for this challenge is ceramics.
There are limits on the size of the design:
Bounding box ceramics: 15 cm x 15 cm x 15 cm
i.Materialise is also hosting an Accessories Challenge, looking for accessories that are inspired by birds.
Video: 3D Printing Gives UK-Based Collcap Packaging Competitive Edge
Collcap Packaging in the UK is using revolutionary 3D printing technology to prototype cosmetics packaging for their many international perfumery and cosmetics suppliers. Using the Stratasys Objet30 Pro 3D printer, Collcap’s designers are able to turn 3D CAD designs into accurate prototypes using a choice of 7 different materials ranging from blue, gray, white and black to clear transparency, high temperature resistance and polypropylene-like.
The transparent material (Objet VeroClear) is particularly useful in simulating glass and PMMA. 3D printing allows Collcap to place precise transparent replicas in the hands of their customers only a few short hours after their initial design. Once the chosen 3D printed models are approved the designs are sent to glass cutting and then final manufacturing.