Photo credit: Industry of the Ordinary

More and more, we see methods of 3D printing popping up in the art world, and we are lucky to have great relationships with so many daring MakerBot artists out in the wild.

One of these is Tom Burtonwood, a co-founder of the What It Is gallery in Chicago. For another exhibition initiated by the artists collectively known as Industry of the Ordinary (and ordinarily known as Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson), Tom created a unique piece of 3D scanning and printing that has since been featured on Thingiverse. The exhibition is being dubbed a “mid-career retrospective”, so it is fitting that Industry of the Ordinary invited others to produce their portraits.

Tom’s piece, “Two Heads are Better than One”, was made on his MakerBot Replicator and uses scans of the artists’ heads from Autodesk’s program 123D Catch, stitched together into a model using Netfabb. Merging the heads together on each bead of the necklace celebrates the duo’s collaboration over the years. There are four different beads, each showing the heads three times, strung together with a white leather cord. As you can see in the photos below, these are beautiful scans and prints, showing how far we’ve come in using MakerBots for art.

There are two things to know here. First is that you can see the whole exhibition yourself and get a feel for 3D printed art (details bel0w). Tom’s Improbable Objects collection is also an incredible exploration of 3D printing as an artistic medium.

The second thing to know is that Tom is encouraging the community to find the necklace on Thingiverse and upload new derivatives. This could be any variation on the necklace, or a new use of the head scans.

Industry of the Ordinary: 2003-2013 Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Chicago Cultural Center 4th floor
78 E. Washington Street, Chicago
August 17, 2012-February 17, 2013

If you haven’t checked out Thingiverse citizen dutchmogul’s Pocket-Dungeon playset, you need to stop what you’re doing and check them out on Thingiverse right now.  This totally modular set was designed in TinkerCAD, a free online and easy to use CAD website that allows you to share directly to Thingiverse.  What I like about this little set is that I could see myself having as much, or even more, fun putting together a dungeon layout as I would have playing the game itself.  Each of these intricate little pieces was printed on their MakerBot Replicator at 0.1mm layer height – which means you can really see all their little design details.  My personal favorites are the little creatures wearing cloaks.

And, if strategy games are more your thing, you might want to check out their Pocket-Tactics playset too!  For more photos, rules for each game, and information about dutchmogul’s sets you can also check out their blog at IllGottenGames.com.

Hey, check this out. Dave Jones at EEVBlog does a “teardown” of The Replicator. He makes a great point: now that we only sell fully assembled machines, a lot of people might not know what’s going on behind the curtains. Here’s your chance, but be warned, it does get fairly technical!

Dear readers:

You can now expect a significantly lower wait time when you order The Replicator.

That’s right, while we used to quote twelve weeks, we can now get The Replicator to you in 30 days or less. You’ll notice the change on our store page, too. But wait, there’s more. Even though we are quoting a 30-day lead time, we are shipping sooner than that in many cases. In fact, last Thursday, for the first time in company history, we took an order and shipped a MakerBot in the same day.

Get ‘em while the gettin’s good!

 

This past weekend, Michael Curry and I verified that “everything is up to date in Kansas City” spending time at Hammerspace and Maker Faire Kansas City with the KC Fabricators MUG  and a bunch of the CCCKC crew. Well, we also got a chance to spend time with members of hackerspaces and makerspaces from all over the region, and have now embarked on a mini-tour to visit the home bases of handful of these great folks.

We are particularly aiming to connect with local MakerBot User Groups (MUGs) to introduce the Capture Your Town project — sharing tips and tricks from the field to help each group level up quickly and start sharing things they love about their towns on Thingiverse. Check the slideshow above for the latest snaps from our journey — and read below for chances to meet up with us on our travels this week!

ChiMUG CaptureSession — Chicago, IL — Monday, June 25th, 10am-1pm

Michael and I will be joining Mike Moceri, Tom Burtonwood, and other members of ChiMUG to hit the Art Institute of Chicago Museum and/or The Field Museum to perform some Chicago-focused Capture Your Town. This visit will be fast and furious: definitely an exciting day, all before lunchtime!

Milwaukee Makerspace — Milwaukee, WI — Monday, June 25th, 7pm-11pm

After completing the CaptureSession, Michael and I will head 2hrs north up to Milwaukee to spend an evening with the Milwaukee Makerspace crew sharing the MakerBot Replicators and printed objects we are bringing, and checking out this awesome space and community.

Sector67 — Madison, WI — Tuesday, June 26th, 6pm-8pm

Now, I’ve been excited about attending Sector67 for a couple of months now, after seeing images of Nathan Davis’s MakerBot/Arduino music project. We have heard that there are some awesome MakerBot Operators at this space and I certainly had a good time hanging out with members of this space in Kansas City. When they weren’t elbow (wrist?) deep into repairing their Power Racing Series vehicle, that is.

The Mill — Minneapolis, MN — Wednesday, June 27th, 6pm-8pm

Our first stop in Minneapolis is The Mill, a new educational industrial arts/maker space. The rumor on the streets of Maker Faire KC are that a gaggle of educators will be racing over to join us at The Mill for The Replicator demo as well as to learn about MakerBot’s curriculum resources and opportunities for the classroom. Also, there are a bunch of MakerBot Operators who orbit around this space: I’m looking forward to meeting them!

Hack Factory — Minneapolis, MN — Wednesday, June 27th, 8:30pm-11pm

After hanging out at The Mill, join us for “hacker hours” (i.e. late!) with Twin Cities Maker @ the Hack Factory for BBQ, beer, and all sorts of project show-and-tell and socializing. TC Maker has had MakerBots since the early days so I am looking forward to checking out what sort of 3D printing activity is going on here — and to see who’s running their MakerBots lately!

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.

Welcome to David’s dining room, where there’s not much food, but plenty of food for thought. There’s a lot going on here. A Replicator, a Cupcake, a vinyl cutter; and that’s not to mention the CNC mill and CNC plasma cutter in his garage.

David tells me that where he MakerBots is also where people in the community come to hack on their own projects. He’s basically running a hackerspace (!), “…except nobody pays a membership and I sleep in the back.”

 

David’s Thingiverse page is a great collection of Things like accessories for your bot or workspace and a bunch of lasercut pieces for organizing your gear. Go check it out!

 

Say hello to our newest operator!

 

Me & My daughter are very happy that the Makerbot arrived (Sweden)! Promised to print some toys Thanks @Makerbot via.me/-1n5upsq

— Ticko (@Ticko) June 1, 2012

 

If that doesn’t help you start your day off with a smile… I just don’t know how to help you.

 

This last weekend I had the good fortune to be able to help out with the MakerBot booth at the 2012 Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo. ¹  So many people had so many interesting questions that I’d like to just can’t help sharing a few of them here on the blog.

One of my favorite series of questions came from two boys who were at the booth with their father.  After watching half a squirrel being printed out, they asked what material the MakerBot was using to make objects.  I explained that it was the same ABS that went into Legos.  All of a sudden the pairs of eyes that were watching the Replicator were now on me with laser focus.  They had to know if the robot could make Legos.  I told them that people had, indeed, shared designs for Lego compatible bricks on Thingiverse and they were no longer constrained to only have those bricks they could find in stores – they could have any brick they could design.  Now, that got their attention.

Their father, ever the savvy and wary consumer, wanted to know just how expensive it would be to make those bricks.  I responded with my own question – how many plastic building pieces could they buy for $50?  The father and both kids agreed that it wasn’t much – $50.00 might buy you a medium sized Lego set.  I reminded them that those boxes were also mostly empty – you buy a lot of air when you buy a box of Legos. ²  Hefting a spool of ABS plastic in their direction I told them that $50.00 would buy enough plastic to make more than two pounds of bricks – bricks of any size and shape they could imagine.  That definitely got the dad’s attention.

1. Near San Francisco [↩]
2. Don’t get me wrong.  I love Legos and own a LOT of them. [↩]

I’ve shared the video before of Toronto agency Teehan+Lax making its first thing on a MakerBot. Now they have a new video focused on a smart milk carton that alerts you when you’re running low on milk, and they prototyped it on a MakerBot.¹

 

On one hand, having a MakerBot gives you the power to create things for yourself, and Thingiverse is filled with thousands of examples. But then you have people who use it to create things for others, especially the first-through-tenth versions of a new thing. Teehan+Lax is not just making pretty things, but also real world products, with The Replicator. Sweet!

I would say, “this is going to become a trend,” but it already has. I just saw this post from twitter: the Swedish design group People People now have a Replicator, too.

We are finally up and running with our Makerbot Replicator! It will be a great tool for us making prototypes in the various stages of the design process.

 

Look how they’ve marked their Left and Right extruders. Let’s hope People People will be showing us some sweet Dualstrusion sometime soon! Speaking of, I’d love to know what colors design agencies use the most when they’re MakerBotting.

 

1. hat tip Shapeways Blog [↩]