Tag: 3D Printing

Rub ‘n Buff on Shapeways Black Detail Material

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!

Shapeway Prints – Iris Mk2 and Heart Rings – oops

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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Parametric Modelling in Google Sketchup and Ponoko friendly SVG export for Sketchup

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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Cute colourful heart rings!

Heart Rings painted by Peter Paul (Shapeways)
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.

Rapid Prototyping – Mechanical Iris Diaphragm

Shapeways had a little Halloween special last month where they offered 66% off on their new black detail material. Always wanting to try out some 3D printing for myself, this offer reeled me in!
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!

Shapeways had a little Halloween special last month where they offered 66% off on their new black detail material.  Always wanting to try out some 3D printing for myself, this offer reeled me in!
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

The concept is a mechanical iris diaphragm, similar to those in cameras but on a much larger scale.  If you’re a Stargate fan, you would have think this is a much SMALLER scale version of the Stargate iris, then I would say that only has 20 blades…mine has 24!

There’s not much design detail out on the web, or at least no design drawings to plagiarise but I’ve seen enough stargate to try design something up myself…

Continue reading “Rapid Prototyping – Mechanical Iris Diaphragm”