If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the top of the part, emitting a small amount of plastic to smooth the surface. [Make Wonderful Things] asserts that you don’t need to do this […]
One of the more promising 3D printing technologies that hasn’t quite yet had its spotlight is volumetric 3D printing. Researchers from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, have developed a new method that uses a high-speed periscope instead of rotating the printing volume — resulting in print times of less than one second. Normal volumetric […]
Thermoforming is the process of softening a material enough so that it can be tweaked into a new shape, with the source of the thermal energy being not particularly relevant. Correspondingly, after [Zion Brock]’s recent video on his journey into thermoforming PLA with a mold and a heat gun, he got many comments suggesting that […]
If you’re looking to jack up your car and you don’t have anything on hand, your 3D printer might not be the first tool you look towards. With that said, [Alan Reiner] had great success with a simple idea to create a surprisingly capable scissor jack with a multi-material print. The design will look familiar […]
One of the best parts of 3D printing is that you can freely download the plans for countless model from sites like Thingiverse, Printables, and others. Yet with the veritable flood of models on these sites you also want to have some level of quality. Here recent news pertaining to Thingiverse is probably rather joyful, […]
Making sure the heatgun is on ‘low’ and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock) Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire […]
The door sensor in its new enclosures. (Credit: Dillan Stock) A common sight in ‘smart homes’, door sensors allow you to detect whether a door is closed or open, enabling the triggering of specific events. Unfortunately, most solutions for these sensors are relatively bulky and hard to miss, making them a bit of a eyesore. […]
When it comes to knowledge there are things you know as facts because you have experienced them yourself or had them verified by a reputable source, and there are things that you know because they are common knowledge but unverified. The former are facts, such as that a 100mm cube of water contains a litre […]
We’ve been following [Vik Olliver]’s progress on the μRepRap project with interest for some time now. The project’s goal is to build a 3D printer that can print feature sizes down to about 10 microns – the same feature size used in the Intel 4004 processor. At the recent Open Everything 2026 conference, [Vik] presented […]