Friday, May 1. 2009[Concept] Nutty drive
The driving mechanism that pushes the thermoplasts or metals through the heater chamber (for making them liquid) is a very critical one. It needs to push the plastic with a strong and reliable grip. A threaded scew, coach bolt, worm-wheel and pinch wheel versions have been made. This is another concept, using a nut instead of a thread, inspired by Forrest's idea (see here).
 The primary gears should be laser cut or milled. The sub-assemblies should be stacked, rotated 120' degrees axially (for 3) or 180' degrees (for two). Of course the actual design should be refined and needs more parts. But I'd first like to have some reactions and critique 
Friday, May 1. 2009[ThingAlert] Stylus
Today, antifuchs designed a stylus to be 3D printed on a home fabricator such as the RepRap or Makerbot. It was posted as a Thing on thingiverse.com.
 The stylus (click picture for lager version) If you have a PDA or touch screen phone with stylus, you have probably lost your stylus at some point in time. This stupid little thing costs near nothing in materials, but is expensive to buy separately. But if you have a 3D printer at home, this means having reduced +/- 16 euros, mostly coming from inventory, packaging, handling and shipping costs to less than 16 cents. That's a > 100-fold decrease in costs! Added benefit is that you don't need to wait days for it to arrive. Well, less than 10 minutes probably. That's the second 100-plus-fold decrease, time! These are products for which the current distribution model cannot compete with a digital distribution and print-at-home scenario. This and similar products clearly show that once RepRaps and Makerbots are more common, this will generate an immense societal value! I've tagged the stylus 'spare parts', along with 4 other parts, so you can easily find similar items:  This way we can keep track of the kinds of user-contributed products surface on thingiverse! |
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