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Here at printedsolid.com, through the use of a mix of dark magic and science, we have discovered the secret to turn plastic into metal.  That’s right.  We’re modern day alchemists. 

Alright, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. 

There are a lot of great applications for 3D printing in the field of architecture.  

Here is a mass model for a large building.  The black material is the grounds with the road and parking lot recessed.  The white material is an outline of the building.  The overall scale is about 4” squared.

People refer to 3D printing as ‘mass customization’.  You have the combination of an automated production capability in the 3D printer without the high up front tooling costs that typically result in mass production of a generic product.  You can take a base design, modify it so that it suits your needs exactly and then print it out without a ton of manual labor.  

Here’s a great example of that concept at work.

A few weeks ago, my wife and daughters were out of town.  I missed them a little so I decided to try to figure out how to turn one of their pictures into a 3D object on my Makerbot Replicator printer.  

I stumbled across a cool program called PhotoToMesh.  This program converts 2D pictures into 3D surface mesh files, which can then be printed.

So far, I have posted examples of more ‘artsy’ type things I have done.  Today I am going to go with something that is a pretty drastic departure.

The object is a bearing made of gears.  Each gear is a herringbone gear.  For those of you that are not into mechanical things, this means that the gear looks like a tractor tire.  The use of the herringbone gears gives the bearing very good thrust load capability(when you push against the face of the center or outer gears while the others are held in place).

There are a few really cool things about this.