Tag Archives: Wired
IndieGoGo Campaign The Touch-Up Promises to Smooth 3D Printing
Crowdfunding Campaign to End Manual Polishing for 3D Printing
One of the less publicized aspects of 3D printing, specifically FDM, is the tedious work required after you press “print” with your MakerBot, Printrbot, Ultimaker, or any other 3D printer. Every 3D printer has a defined resolution, which is the thickness of each layer. Typical desktop 3D printers have a resolution of around 100 to 200 microns. The result looks like the image below, visible horizontal lines in the finished product.
To smooth out these lines, advanced 3D printing enthusiasts typically use a sanding technique followed by polishing. Remember, with many desktop 3D printers, the material used is ABS plastic. It is soft enough to smooth out, but requires this manual effort.
Introducing The Touch-Up
3D Customization Co. has developed a product that employs a new technique for smoothing and finishing 3D prints without the manual effort. The product is called The Touch-Up, and 3D Customization Co. has launched an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign to raise $5,000.
We interviewed CEO Westley Harrell about The Touch-Up.
On 3D Printing: What is The Touch-Up?
Westley Harrell: The Touch-Up is a product used to smooth and polish rough edges due to the 3D Printing process. Achieve amazing results using various print layers. Imagine a finish you can see yourself in! Literally! Stop wasting time hand sanding and hand polishing your 3D printed ABS models. Let The Touch-Up do it for you! This product allows you to get professional looking models faster by letting The Touch-Up smooth your print for you while another model prints. We found that when using MakerBot’s ABS filament, we were able to get faster polishing times with a great overall consistency with each model polished. (Same filament used in our video and pictures)
I used to spend a lot of time finishing my models after they were printed to get a really clean and smooth surface. I tried different techniques from spray enamel to dipping the part in different chemicals. It took months until I figured out the best method for polishing 3D printed ABS models. That was to submerse the ABS model in Acetone vapor. From that came the idea of vapor sanding and The Touch-Up was conceived.
Anyone who uses ABS to 3D Print will find The Touch-Up a great addition to their 3D Printing Arsenal. We made it easy to use and easy to clean so anyone who 3D Prints could use it.
On 3D Printing: Why are you turning to IndieGoGo for funding?
Westley Harrell: We chose IndieGoGo because we wanted to make The Touch-Up available to anyone, anywhere. This campaign also helps provide funding for upgrades and will help us move forward with this product. Also through this 30-day campaign we will be able to identify the need for this product, and determine how much time should be invested in bringing this product forward to consumers in the future. This is just the first project we are bringing to the public. We want to identify which product is in the highest demand.
Origins of Acetone Vapor Bath in the Maker Community
While The Touch-Up is the first commercialized product to use an acetone vapor bath, the origins of this technique look to be from the Maker community. In February 2013, Austin Wilson posted on his blog about a new technique that he and his friend Neil Underwood were developing to polish 3D printed objects using acetone vapor baths.
Neil also posted his results on the RepRap blog. Neil explained his inspiration:
Treating ABS parts with acetone is almost as old as RepRap itself, but usually this has involved either dipping the part into liquid acetone, which causes white streaks in the parts, or brushing the acetone onto the part with a slurry mix, which can work very well but tends to be a messy process.
I have seen several setups out there, one by the Solidoodle Folks that involved a deep fryer, ice, tubing, and a candy thermometer, or completely passive systems that just used unheated acetone like TBuser of Makerbot did.
Unlike the other experiments, Neil and Austin heated the acetone in a closed chamber. The results were impressive.
In March, Wired magazine published a feature about Neil and Austin and their vapor bath technique. With the additional exposure of their approach came a new caveat:
Anyone interested in trying this should take care. Wilson says points out that acetone isn’t especially dangerous, but it has to be handled carefully since the vapor can catch fire if exposed to sparks or flames.
If you like this idea and want to help fund the first commercial product to use acetone vapor baths to polish 3D printed objects, go check out The Touch-Up at IndieGoGo.
Video: How 3D Printing Will Change the World and Industry Interviews
In the PBS video below, the 3D printing industry is profiled.
3D Printing is heralded as a revolutionary and disruptive technology, but how will these printers truly affect our society? Beyond an initial novelty, 3D Printing could have a game-changing impact on consumer culture, copyright and patent law, and even the very concept of scarcity on which our economy is based. From at-home repairs to new businesses, from medical to ecological developments, 3D Printing has an undeniably wide range of possibilities which could profoundly change our world.
The video includes interviews with:
- Sam Cervantes from Solidoodle on innovation
- Carine Carmy from Shapeways on supply chain disruption
- Michael Weinberg from Public Knowledge on copyright and IP
- Joseph Flaherty from Wired.com on bioprinting and more
Watch the full video below.
Chris Anderson Clears the Air: 3D Printing Won’t Work for Making Guns
Former editor-in-chief of Wired Chris Anderson weighed in on the 3D printed gun debate with a simple rebuttal:
“3D printing is a terrible technology for the working components of a gun. There is no tensile strength. It would blow up in your face. You can buy guns in Walmart — they are not a scarce product. And if you want a good barrel you can go and get a bit of plumbing from the store.”
This comes after a wave of concern and paranoia about people 3D printing their own guns at home in the wake of school shootings that rocked the news. One such example was the “Wiki Weapon” from Defense Distributed, pictured below.
Hopefully this type of common sense will prevent regulation from hindering the potential of 3D printing to revolutionize our world.
Chris Anderson photo by Tom Foremski.
Via Wired.
3D Printed Car Urbee 2 Announced: Light, Aerodynamic, and Custom Made
Last June, we featured Urbee, the first 3D printed car. Optimized for renewable energy, this novel design promises 200 miles per gallon. Details about the next generation design, called Urbee 2, are now coming to light as the car nears production.
It has a metal chassis but a plastic frame, 3 wheels and weighs only 1,200 pounds. And nearly everything is made through 3D printing.
Jim Kor, head of Kor Ecologic, talks about the process of designing the Urbee series in the video below.
In an interview with Kor, Wired also shares new details about the new 3D printed car.
“We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” [Kor] says of the Urbee. “It’s been the right move.”
Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours [to produce].
Besides easy reproduction, making the car body via FDM affords Kor the precise control that would be impossible with sheet metal. The current model has a curb weight of just 1,200 pounds.
Kor used the design freedom of 3D printing to combine a typical car’s multitude of parts into simple unibody shapes. For example, when he prints the car’s dashboard, he’ll make it with the ducts already attached without the need for joints and connecting parts. What would be dozens of pieces of plastic and metal end up being one piece of 3D printed plastic.
“The thesis we’re following is to take small parts from a big car and make them single large pieces,” Kor says. By using one piece instead of many, the car loses weight and gets reduced rolling resistance, and with fewer spaces between parts, the Urbee ends up being exceptionally aerodynamic.” How aerodynamic? The Urbee 2′s teardrop shape gives it just a 0.15 coefficient of drag.
More from Wired.
Can 3D printing revolutionize the car industry?
Accused of Stealing, 3D Printing Design Marketplace 3DLT Apologizes
Yesterday, Wired reported that a new 3D printing design marketplace called 3DLT was accused of selling stolen merchandise, i.e., designs, on its site.
Designer and co-founder of Nervous System, Jessica Rosencrantz, was surprised to learn that some of her fashion designs were being sold on 3DLT. Wired interviewed Rosencrantz:
“They never contacted us,” she says. “I had never heard of them until someone sent me the link last night to ask me if it was legitimate.”
The designs at issue are five of 3DLT’s fashion offerings (until recently, the entire fashion category). “They changed the names and descriptions but are using our images,” says Rosencrantz, “They claim to have the STL files for these designs, but I guarantee they do not. The last design they show — ‘circle necklace’ (our name ‘Radiolaria Necklace’) — isn’t even 3-D printed.”
Today, 3DLT CEO Pablo Arellano Jr. issued an apology on the site.
3DLT.com is currently in private beta. The site is not yet live and we are still testing the platform. We recently had an issue where the eCommerce portion of our site was activated and exposed to the public. Some of the products and images on the site were being used as placeholders and were not approved for use. These products and images have been removed from our site. Two orders were placed. The users have been contacted, informed of the issue and will be refunded any monies due.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We take this situation seriously and will ensure that upon launch, all of our designer onboarding processes are clearly documented and available for public viewing, including our process for vetting design files.
We apologize again for any inconvenience and have put the site on hold until our development team fixes the matter.
So was this simply an innocent mistake? It definitely calls attention to the issues of copyright and piracy in 3D printing.
