The calendar is basically a grid of 7 x 8 cells. Each cell contains a cube corresponding to that particular day. The cube has a red and a black and white side. You can indicate the current day by turning the cube to the red side. For a new month, you rearrange all the cubes […] Read more

Ok, so the big promise of 3D printing is that I can get whetever item I need at any moment, in whatever shape I desire, which would be very handy for repairs and replacements. As anyone dealing with 3D printing can attest, the truth is that it is not always that easy. Usually making replacement parts […] Read more

Recently my kids inherited a very old children’s microscope, which had been used in elementary school. As these low budget microscopes go, it’s resolution and chromatic fidelity were abysmal, and despite featuring a decent nominal magnification of x500, it was more or less a glorified magnifying glass. It’s really difficult to get reasonable images out […] Read more

Using your phone in your car has almost become a necessity, for better or worse. Naturally, the accessories industry has come up with a plethora of adapters and phone holders. But what if you are in a car that you use only temporarily, where you can’t install a holder permanently? Enter the phone – cup […] Read more

My daughter is the proud owner of a loom. Recently her interest in the loom was rekindled by a school project, and as we wanted to start working with the loom again, we noticed that one part was missing. A wooden bar with slits which keeps the individual threads nicely separated, so that the shuttle can […] Read more

Here is a run-down of a few nice things I found on Thingiverse, ready for 3D printing. Clicking on the images will take you directly to the Thingiverse object. Let’s start with some transportation options. This nice rocket, by Gabor Vecsei, has that nice quirky vintage cartoon look:   And here is a nice model […] Read more

Sometimes state-of-the-art manufacturing and old school crafting techniques go together surprisingly well. In an attempt to marry 3D printing and papier mâché, I created a raster scaffold of an elephant (based on this thing). You might consider this a sculpture in and of itself, but I wanted to use it as the basis for a more […] Read more

This was an experiment: I wanted to see how well Shapeway’s stainless steel prints turn out, especially for tiny details. For a test, I picked a model of the Lockheed Model 10 Electra – the airplane Amelia Earheart flew on her last flight. I will be showing some paper airplane models at the Aero Expo […] Read more

This is a 3d print I made last minute for Easter: A bird in an egg-shaped cage. The egg is just a little bit smaller than a real chicken egg. I like this one in particular because it is something that would be difficult to do with injection molding – at least in one piece and […] Read more

My wife found a very nice idea on the web for cookie bears holding almonds. Naturally, we wanted to have those bears, too. However, we didn’t have a bear-shaped cookie cutter. So I turned to Thingiverse and found this very nice cutter from user rozoom, which not only cuts out bears, but also makes dents for the […] Read more

You got to love 3D printing: The turnaround time from an idea to its execution is extremely short. Yesterday in the evening I had the idea for a spider ring (don’t ask – that’s the kind of ideas you get when you have small kids). Scavenged Thingiverse for a spider model, and found this very nice Creative […] Read more

With the popular and affordable standard method of 3D printing, FDM (fused deposition modelling, a fancy way of saying that the object is created by squirting a string of liquified plastic layer by layer onto a support), one problem is that overhangs are difficult to print. Anytime something protrudes horizontally from a model, the printer literally needs […] Read more