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Propeller Hats!

A picture post showing the latest delivery from Shapeways.  Joris just posted guidelines on stainless steel printing so I thought I’ll post some photos to show what tiny detail can be achieved.

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The 3 different styles of rings designed using Alibre Xpress have arrived from Shapeways!

The various rings from Shapeways next to a Ponoko test card

The ‘thin wire one’ (can’t think of a name) has never been printed before.  It was first dreamt up in the shower , I’m surprised how well a scribble on the fogged up glass of the shower turned out printed in stainless steel!

Lets have a better look

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Stainless steel and bronze rings

Hey look, there’s my invoice.  $1.32 USD for the ‘thin wire one’ (have to think of a name…or have to remember what I named it  on Shapeways…) – great price eh?

The print quality is very good though it appears (not sure) that some post processing (polishing?) was done.

Nothing much else to say!  Have to move on to the next post…Ciao!

Just a few happy snaps of the reprinted models Shapeways has sent.  The detail on the white strong and flexible material is crisp this time around and gives me confidence again to start ordering in this material

The heart shape rings came out in perfect crisp detail!

Photos after the break…

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Shapeways has a tutorial on painting models printed using their ‘White Strong & Flexible’ (WS&F) material but not very much hints to go on for their other materials.  I had ’some’ luck with using Rub ‘n Buff on the WS&F material on the heart ring so I thought I’ll give it a go on the black detail material from Shapeways.

One quick photo to summarise the result :

Iris blades painted with Rub 'n Buff without the buffing...

The finish is pretty good for a 20 second rub on.  I only used tissues to apply the rub n buff because i couldn’t get my hands on any decent cloth and I didn’t want my fingertips all silver again.  With some experimentation I noticed that it is much easier to apply the paint along the ‘grain’.  Keep it mind that using this paint could get a bit messy so remember to work ontop of some tissue/newspaper!  (I used tissue ontop of this very laptop I’m typing on now).

Give it a try!

This is really a continuation of a forum thread where I may have complained too much about the quality of the recent shapeways prints I received.

Here are some photos with some explanations/captions :-

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Too lazy for many words, click the link below for a SWF animation showing the process…

Exporting Alibre Xpress Files to Shapeways STL

The problem

I’ve recently signed up Ponoko’s Prime account and wanted to get something made.  I rather into a rather annoying problem, Alibre Xpress doesn’t have a SVG export.  I needed a way to design something and export it as SVG.

I’ll admit the long post title is a problem too

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Heart Rings painted by Peter Paul (Shapeways)

I just ran into this Shapeways Blog Post and couldn’t resist reposting this photo of those colourful ring fest.  If you’ve read earlier in my mechanical iris diaphragm post I was just playing around with Alibre Xpress and see if I could design a ring using that, guess someone at Shapeways thought they were cute and printed them out!  The rings are painted using a water based paint, I just wonder how it’ll look with an acrylic paint to smoothen out the surface somewhat.

So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep   Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept