Yesterday morning, the Space Shuttle Discovery made its last flight over Washington, DC before settling into its permanent home within the Smithsonian.

In anticipation of the end of the shuttle era, our friend Micah Ganske designed a beautiful 3D-printed piece in which the space craft is conspicuous in its absence. Now Micah’s innovative work will be on display, along with Micah, at the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan.

Micah will be participating in a residency at MAD every Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., now until August 24. On the top floor, in the Open Studios space, you’ll find Micah — the resident Singularity Evangelist — demonstrating a MakerBot Replicator and talking about his process in creating 3D printed art.

Micah writes in his profile at the MAD website:

I am a conceptual figurative artist.  Like any conceptual art, conceptual figuration begins with the ideas the artist wishes to impart onto the viewer.  Where it diverges from non-figuration is how the viewer responds to seeing the depiction of figures.  The viewer, being by a matter of course, also a figure, is made complicit and in turn necessary to the success and conceptual completion of the piece.  A figure establishes an immediate connection with the viewer, as it is a vessel for the viewer’s own psychological projections as well as a window for the artist to project ideas onto the viewer.   Paintings of mine that do not feature a literal figure typically invite the viewer in as the missing element of the work.

Our technology-driven culture’s relationship to the natural is the dominant theme in my work.  This subject is close to me because I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, yet spent most of my time indoors with my computer.  A large part of my work is trying to understand the complex and often conflicted ways we respond to our environment.  The tourist’s communion with nature is a fascinating modern pilgrimage that reoccurs in my work because it’s one of the only times we, as a city-centric people, make a point to get outside.  Once we’re there, however, we choose to mediate the whole experience with electronics through picture taking and status updates to our social networking site of choice.”

Whether you’re a New Yorker, or just visiting the city sometime this summer, this is a great addition to your itinerary. If you need  more information, visit the Museum of Art and Design Open Studios page.

Here’s the take-home point of the Instructable I’m sharing with you here:

…it’s possible to 3d print a mold with existing technologies for limited use.

Nice!

For this experiment, Bryan Brutherford (whose work we have previously shown some Pinterest Love) made a 3D-printed mold of his Brutherford Industries logo. In this case he used a high-res Objet printer to print an acrylic photo-polymer mold. The result looks pretty smooth.

Next Bryan sprayed the mold with some silicone mold release, such as this one, and injected some melted cellulose acetate pellets — who among us doesn’t have some cellulose acetate lying around?

It looks like it took six tries to get the injection just right, and that’s not bad. The final result is a really sweet keychain.

What does this mean for MakerBot owners? According to his Instructable, the mold started to deform after 20 uses or so. We do already know that other low-melting point materials can do pretty well in an ABS mold. This sign on Thingiverse by Tinkerer was cast in pewter.

The printed mold here came from an expensive desktop unit, as Bryan is an industrial designer and indicates he used an Objet. Prints on a MakerBot can be stunningly detailed and fine right off the build platform. And if you’re looking to create even smoother surfaces on your print, there are several easy solutions that we’ll be detailing in an upcoming episode of MakerBot TV.

Does anyone have any experience with injection molding?

Any maker/hackerspaces out there with an embroidery machine: Urban Threads is giving away some of its sweet badge designs for free.

It looks like the company wants to recognize such spaces for their contributions to the community by giving away the designs that are otherwise for sale on their site.

All they need to do is contact us at [email protected] with the name & location of their hackerspace and their preferred format for their embroidery machine and we’ll set them up with some awesome designs.  We’re happy to support crafty hackerspaces as best we can, because we think machine embroidery is pretty awesome and hope everyone gets a chance to give it a try.