On Thursday, myself and three of my MakerBot colleagues Michael Curry, Tony Sherwood and Dave Neff, headed to the great midwestern metropolis that is Kansas City, Missouri, to prep for Maker Faire: Kansas City this Saturday.

Sticking to (what we were told to be) strict KC greeting traditions, we hosted a huge Oklahoma Joe’s MakerBot BBQ+Hackathon at Hammerspace last night, joined by a gathering of KC Fabricators MUG and other CCCKC & Hammerspace regulars, all itching for a chance to see a small herd of The MakerBot Replicators in action.

This town has a very special place in MakerBot’s (mechanical) heart – Michael and Tony in particular have spent a great deal of time here — and it has become over time the undisputed US midwestern Paris of the 3D printing world. Actually, it just might be the 3D printing “Paris” of anywhere in the world — take that Paris, France! — with more passionate 3D printing enthusiasts than just about anywhere you’ve heard of.

Maker Faire: Kansas City: Delights for Makers and Minions

Between the MakerBot booth and the tables of MakerBot Operators from all over the country, there will be quite a few 3D printed and 3D printing delights on hand for this “Show Me State” crowd — including sneak previews of MakerBot’s new colors of plastic, a tremendous printed Heart Gears to melt yours, a gorgeous data visualization of the Makers of Thingiverse created by Tony Buser, and Michael Curry’s robot Minion table.

What’s more, MakerBot’s Jeff and RJ have flown out to join us today and they have a handful of Replicators for visitors to purchase on-site, only the second time in history that this opportunity has been possible.

Capture Your Town: Kansas City Style (i.e. Slow-Smoked)

A “special mission” has been declared by the KC Fabricators MUG team: a call for anyone with pride in Kansas City to help capture or model a few of the many distinctive elements of the Kansas City skyline and get them up on Thingiverse.com with the tag “captured” and “kcfabricators“. The options proposed so far (that I have heard) have included the gigantic Shuttlecocks (see below) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Liberty Memorial, the Power and Light Building, and (perhaps meant less sincerely?) 3D scanning the many merry locals staggering from location to location in the Power and Light ”drinking district.”

I’ll be on hand all weekend to help any of you who wish to dive into capturing tools like Autodesk’s 123D Catch – and keep your eye to the Community Capture Your Town project page for information and advice. I have promised to Craig and Luis that if KC Fabricators get KC monuments and other delights up by Friday or Saturday night at 10pm, I’ll download and take a look at printing the KC landmark at the MakerBot booth during the weekend.

Hi, my name is Fred Kahl, aka. the Great Fredini (Thingiverse user fredini). I work with Coney Island USA, a nonprofit arts center based in Brooklyn’s famous Amusement District. We preserve uniquely American art forms like the sideshow and burlesque, and run the Coney Island Museum. One of our biggest and oldest programs is the Mermaid Parade, one of the largest art parades in the world, which will happen tomorrow- Saturday, June 23rd!

For the past 30 years, thousands of people have dressed up to help usher in the beach’s summer season. However, with permits and insurance the parade is very costly to put on. Often times we can barely pay our bills, so we never have a lot of money to spend on trophies for the best marchers. Last year we got a complaints that they looked like generic salesman of the year awards, so for our 30th parade we knew we had to do something special. Enter MakerBot, who really came through with helping to make this year’s awards exceed our wildest fantasies!

When I first met with MakerBot’s Creative Director Keith Ozar and Social Media Marketing Manager Sasha Litvinov, we came up with the concept that each trophy would consist of the extruded Mermaid Parade logo, decorated with some award specific embellishments sourced from MakerBot’s file sharing community Thingiverse.com. We love Thingiverse and are so thankful to all the creators out there who have shared their models! You have all helped our 30th anniversary parade to be celebrated in style!

You can see all of our final trophies here. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve curated a special list of our favorite Mermaid Parade themed things on Thingiverse…enjoy!

Top Thingiverse Things to bring to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade

Starfish by Sconine
Sconine is a maker who’s really an inspiration for parents out there. His use of 3D printing is all about engaging with his kids in new and exciting ways. The starfish is a great staple for any mermaid themed costume, and my big discovery was how the heat gun can be used to bend them to wrap around objects just like a real starfish would!

Ahab’s Last Stand(Old Sea Salt) by BrianStamile
We chose Ahab for the Judge’s choice award. This thing is also a great example of how the community is starting to scan all sorts of things- from thrift store junk to art in the MET.

Scale Armor by Krest
This is going to be the main building block for my next year’s parade costume! Can’t you imagine a mermaid tail or cape cade out of these?

Burgonet by PrettySmallThings
This helmet arrived on Thingiverse too late to be printed out for this year’s parade, but hopefully I’ll be wearing one next year along with my fish scale armor suit!

8 Bit Mermaid by fredini
I liked this version better than my original Mermaid Scan, but both are cute adaptations of the traditional cast iron doorstop mermaid.
 

Sand Dollar by Catzpaw164
This became the basis for our second and third place award medals- a sort of sea themed olympic medal made of the sand dollar with an octopus on top.

Bucket O’ Octopi by yeoldbrian
If ever there was a Thingiverse mascot this is it! Combined with the sand dollar, along with a little heat gun love to make him conform to the sand dollar surface, this is one of my favorite things ever! The way its been derived so many times is a great testament to the power of sharing that happens on Thingiverse. The Octopi over the parade logo for the Best Sea Creature award is truly magical!

Luna Park Towers by Fredini
Realizing these two models as prints has been a personal dream come true! For over 20 years I have wanted to create a scale model of Coney Island’s famed turn of the century fantasy architecture. When I first became aware of MakerBot, I knew that the project’s time had finally come. Last fall I created these two models, but to my knowledge they had yet to be printed. A special shout out to Jason Batukis from the MakerBot design team who helped these models to be realized prints. I promise that in the next week I’ll update the files on Thingiverse with the new, more print ready ones.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you all at the Mermaid Parade tomorrow!

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis will be on the NPR program Science Friday today at 3 o’clock EDT. Listen on the radio, or go here to listen online! The topic of conversation for the segment will be, “Can 3D Printers Reshape the World?”

Well, yes.

Bre will be joined by Terry Wohlers from Wohlers Associates, and Professor Hod Lipson of Cornell University, co-founder of Fab@Home. The Science Friday crew have also put together a little quiz on 3D printing for you to test your knowledge. I got one of them wrong, but I’m blaming it on my mouse.

Rick Pannen has put up two super sweet posts on his tumblr “Phlegmatic prototyping” about creating a good 3D model of a protein involved in Alzheimer’s Disease. Rick writes that his friend is pursuing a PhD in chemistry and wanted the molecule model for research purposes.

Little problem: the data for the molecule was just a bunch of points in space, and Rick’s friend really needed a model of the surface of the molecule. The open-source program BallView is perfect for this job. If you set that program to “SES”, it generates a surface model using all the atom data. Rick writes that the model below actually didn’t run too well through ReplicatorG, but repairing in NetFabb did the trick.

Now the interesting stuff. Using a custom 3D printer built with MakerBot MK6 extruders, he was able to make the molecule. Of course because of the shape, he had to use some support structure. Here’s what the molecule looked like in black.

The next step was to sand blast the model and cover it in white paint. Then, tediously, to add in some color coding for different atoms: Red = Oxygen, Blue = Nitrogen, Yellow = Sulfur.

It doesn’t look like the model is available on Thingiverse yet, but here’s hoping Rick throws it up sometime soon! There are several excellent related Things already up, which you can find under the Learning category on Thingiverse. Remember to categorize all your new uploads carefully. It helps people find these resources quickly and easily.