3D printing technology news

Easter Island prints
You can now explore Rano Raraku, one of the major quarries on Easter Island, from the comfort of your home. A research team including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York has created the first-ever high-resolution 3D model of the quarry, providing people worldwide with a glimpse of the island, including almost 1,000 of its iconic moai statues.

3D model aids
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Iteration3D Is Parametric Python In The Cloud

It’s happened to all of us: you find the perfect model for your needs — a bracket, a box, a cable clip, but it only comes in STL, and doesn’t quite fit. That problem will never ha…
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Going back to the problem in the introduction, if Iteration3D doesn’t have what you need and you still have an STL you need to change the dimensions of, we can help you with that.

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Production KiCad Template Covers All Your Bases

Ever think about all the moving parts involving a big KiCad project going into production? You need to provide manufacturer documentation, assembly instructions and renders for them to reference, e…
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Ever think about all the moving parts involving a big KiCad project going into production? You need to provide manufacturer documentation, assembly instructions and renders for them to reference, every output file they could want, and all of it has to always stay up to date. [Vincent Nguyen] has a software pipeline to create all the files and documentation you could ever want upon release – with an extensive installation and usage guide, helping you turn your KiCad projects truly production-grade.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63R6Wnx44uY
 
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Grey Havoc said:
www.bbc.com

Will boats be a breakthrough for 3D printing tech?

Dutch firms are betting that hulls made with 3D printing machines will mean cheaper boats.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
Click to expand...

Only someone who never built a boat would even remotely consider a 3d printed hulls. Expensive and slow as fuck to make and heavy to boot . The most compeling case for 3d printing in boatbuilding is in making plugs and molds .

55h
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXze574q08


Rotomolder can likely make between 8-10 hulls in same time and for cost of 1 printed one.
Rotomolding itself only takes 90 minutes ,rest is cooling and demolding
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ChhNb4s50Y


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9FSV3IxP20
 
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Aluminum prints

Even smaller prints available
www.rdworldonline.com

LLNL team hits 1,000x speed boost in 3D nanofabrication

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University say they have built a two-photon lithography system that could push 3D nanofabrication toward manufacturing scale, boosting throughput by more than 1,000 times compared with commercial tools while maintaining minimum...
www.rdworldonline.com www.rdworldonline.com
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University say they have built a two-photon lithography system that could push 3D nanofabrication toward manufacturing scale, boosting throughput by more than 1,000 times compared with commercial tools while maintaining minimum feature sizes of 113 nanometers.

MetaLitho3D
www.llnl.gov

Lab scientists win four 2025 R&D 100 awards

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and engineers have earned four awards among the top 100 inventions worldwide. The trade journal R&D World Magazine recently announced the winners of the awards, often called the "Oscars of innovation," recognizing new commercial products...
www.llnl.gov www.llnl.gov
MetaLitho3D is a one-of-a-kind, high-precision additive manufacturing platform that addresses the limitations of conventional optical systems when scaling up the production rate of 3D nano-architectures to perform wafer-scale, two-photon lithography.

Bad 3D print causes crash
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Failed 3D Printed Part Brings Down Small Plane

Back in March, a small aircraft in the UK lost engine power while coming in for a landing and crashed. The aircraft was a total loss, but thankfully, the pilot suffered only minor injuries. Accordi…
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Back in March, a small aircraft in the UK lost engine power while coming in for a landing and crashed. The aircraft was a total loss, but thankfully, the pilot suffered only minor injuries. According to the recently released report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, we now know a failed 3D printed part is to blame.

The part in question is a plastic air induction elbow — a curved duct that forms part of the engine’s air intake system.

Tiny 3D print helixes

Printable electronics

Light driven deposits

Ice tree

Tech advances

Massive printer
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Surplus Industrial Robot Becomes Two-ton 3D Printer

As the saying goes — when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you a two-ton surplus industrial robot arm, if you’re [Brian Brocken], you apparently make a massive …
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Turning a 2 ton robot into a 3D-printer

In this project I'm turning my industrial robot, an ABB IRB6400, into a 3D-printer. The data is streamed line by line to the robot and the extruder, which has it's own separate controller (RAMPS board). It was a real challange to get the robot's movements to sync up with the extruder but in the...
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Other uses
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Laser Cutter Plus CYMK Spraypaint Equals Full-Color Prints

This is one of those fun hacks that come about from finding a product and going “I wonder if I could…” — in this case, artist/YouTuber [Wesley Treat] found out his favourite…
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Cheap 3D Printer Becomes CNC Wood Engraver

3D printers are built for additive manufacturing. However, at heart, they are really just simple CNC motion platforms, and can be readily repurposed to other tasks. As [Arseniy] demonstrates, it&#8…
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Combinations
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3D Printing And Metal Casting Are A Great Match

[Chris Borge] has made (and revised) many of his own tools using a combination of 3D printing and common hardware, and recently decided to try metal casting. Having created his own tapping arm, he …
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Freeze on
www.smooth-on.com

Freeze Cast Process uses Smooth-On Rubber for Precision Casting

Rubber molds can be made quickly and will accommodate the expansion of water during the freezing process.
www.smooth-on.com www.smooth-on.com
https://www.tiktok.com/video/7300737812549111082


A lovely build
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Windmill Desk Lamp Is Beautifully Soothing

Typically, lamps provide a stationary source of light to illuminate a given area and help us see what we’re doing. However, they can also be a little more artistic and eye-catching, like this…
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Non vacu-forms
This dear, charming man finds ways to combine 3d printing with vacu-forming. I wonder if that might me combined with wind tunnels with very high and low pressures:

hypersonics.tamu.edu

Hypersonic Horizons 2025: The High-Speed Video Challenge - University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics

Section I: General InformationWind Tunnel Warriors: Show your skills!This challenge explores the crucial role of wind tunnels in hypersonic research,
hypersonics.tamu.edu hypersonics.tamu.edu

Cutter

One project
 
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Metal prints
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Printing In Metal With DIY SLM

An accessible 3D printer for metals has been the holy grail of amateur printer builders since at least the beginning of the RepRap project, but as tends to be the case with holy grails, it’s proven…
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New use for printers
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Printing With Metal On The Ender 3 Using Only A Friction Wheel

Printing metal as easily as it is to print with thermoplastics has been a dream for a very long time, with options for hobbyists being very scarce. This is something which [Rotoforge] seeks to chan…
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Print Your Own Standardized Wire Spool Storage

Hardware hackers tend to have loads of hookup wire, and that led [firstgizmo] to design a 3D printable wire and cable spool storage system. As a bonus, it’s Gridfinity-compatible! There are a…
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Nice little phaser bank
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Print Your Next LED Bezel

LED bezels (also known as LED panel-mount holders) are great, so how about 3D printing the next ones you need? Sure, they’re inexpensive to purchase and not exactly uncommon. But we all know …
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Big spaceship "mini"

Cute

Controversy
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Washington State Bill Seeks To Add Firearms Detection To 3D Printers

Washington State’s House Bill 2321 is currently causing a bit of an uproar, as it seeks to add blocking technologies to 3D printers, in order to prevent them from printing “a firearm or…
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No rubber?
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Why Can’t I 3D Print With Rubber?

A friend of mine and I both have a similar project in mind, the manufacture of custom footwear with our hackerspace’s shiny new multi-material 3D printer. It seems like a match made in heaven…
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Printronics
www.nanowerk.com

The geometry fix that makes printable graphene inks 100 times more concentrated

Reshaping graphene from flat sheets into compact particles solves a key manufacturing problem, enabling printable conductive inks without the additives that weaken performance.
www.nanowerk.com

Deploy
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Origami On Another Level With 3D Printing

Origami has become known as a miracle technique for designers. Elegant compliant mechanisms can leverage the material properties of a single geometry in ways that are sometimes stronger than those …
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Control
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Chamber Master: Control Your 3D Printer Enclosure Like A Pro

Having an enclosed 3D printer can make a huge difference when printing certain filaments that are prone to warping. It’s easy enough to build an enclosure to stick your own printer in, but it…
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Add strength
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Pause Print, Add Hardware, And Enjoy Strength

3D Printing is great, but it is pretty much the worst way to make any given part– except that every other technique you could use to make that part is too slow and/or expensive, making the 3D…
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injector

Odd prints

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
m.youtube.com m.youtube.com

Engines

Real or fake?

Might this new press allow for a flying mold?

Two sheets with a 3D print head between them...or just fill with UV hardening glue so a continuous curved product can come out--very like how glass burners are always kept hot.

Good in space?
 
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AML

Multimaterials
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Multi-material Parts The Easy Way

You have a part that needs different colors or different material properties — with a multi-color 3D printer, no problem. You can also laboriously switch filaments on a single-color printer. …
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Everyday use
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Testing A Continuous Printing Mod For The Bambu Lab A1 Mini

There are a few types of continuous 3D printing with FDM printers, with a conveyer belt and automatic build plate swapping the most common types. The advantage of build plate swapping is that it au…
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Resources
www.therpf.com

Let's Talk All Things 3d for prop creation, Scan, Design, Sculpt (real and digital), Print and Finish

Here we place our collective tools, tips and processes for the gathering, processing and producing of replica props using the 3d print in combination with other casting and finishing tools. For years, I have hand built some things, sculpted others in clay and created molds and used multiple...
www.therpf.com www.therpf.com
 
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New findings

Extrusion

Laser use

3D print surface

Sculpting

Delete

Coating

Helps

Silica Gel Makes For Better 3D Prints

It’s possible to improve your 3D prints in all kinds of ways. You can tune your printer’s motion, buy better filament, or tinker endlessly with any number of slicer settings. Or, as [Di…
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Touchless Support Leaves No Mark

[Clough42] created a 3D print for a lathe tool and designed in some support to hold the piece on the bed while printing. It worked, but removing the support left unsightly blemishes on the part. A …
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PLA Mold To Plaster Bust, No Silicone Needed

3D printing is wonderful, but sometimes you just don’t want to look at a plastic piece. Beethoven’s bust wouldn’t look quite right in front of your secret door if it was bright or…
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Polymer Skins That Change Color And Texture When Exposed To Water

Researchers at Stanford University recently came up with an interesting way (Phys.org summary) to create patterns and colors that emerge when a polymer is exposed to water. Although the paper itsel…
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STL Editing With FreeCAD

[Kevin] admits that FreeCAD may not be the ideal tool for editing STL files. But it is possible, and he shares some practical advice in the video below. If you want to get the most out of your 3D p…
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Ostensibly to stop 3D printed guns, legislation is being proposed to put spyware on every printer and even CNC machines to watch for the making of guns. Another path is to develop revenue streams from fees for making parts that resemble claimed intellectual property like hero figures and space ships.

View: https://youtu.be/x0x1mQSkvmk?si=CMnoxYfFqAZcSZ3o

View: https://youtu.be/s6Iwoq2faMk?si=a-_6YUq_S3RJxbWa


View: https://youtu.be/cFWO8xXlGcw?si=HeaevU7ZzbG8JF3K


View: https://youtu.be/KC8viXze52U?si=Sb1z_GCR7jeQkMvs
 
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Like we don't have enough hobbies targeted by C&Ds as it is.

Layers
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Changing Print Layer Patterns To Increase Strength

Dy default, the slicing software used for 3D printers has the printer first create the walls around the edges of a print, then goes back to deposit the infill pattern. [NeedItMakeIt], however, expe…
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The Latest From RepRapMicron – Nail Gel, First Objects, And More

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 micro…
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DIY
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Building A Metal 3D Printer With A Laser Welder

The development of cheaper, more powerful lasers has always been a cause for excitement among hackers, and fiber lasers are no exception. One of the newer tools they’ve enabled is the laser welder,…
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Curves
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Need A Curved Plastic Mesh? Print Flat, Curve Later

Need a plastic mesh in a custom pattern? 3D print it, no problem. But what if one needs a curved plastic mesh? That’s considerably harder to 3D print, but [Uncle Jessy]’s figured out a …
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Fix on the fly

lignin prints

Weave prints

Soft prints

Brain print

Fluidic prints

Even smaller nozzles?

plastic

3D print of Tungsten carbide–cobalt (WC–Co)
The results demonstrated this method to be effective in maintaining the hardness and mechanical integrity of conventionally manufactured WC-Co cemented carbides, achieving a base material with hardness of over 1400 HV (a unit representing resistance to penetration), without introducing any defects or decomposition.

Materials at this hardness level rank among the toughest used in industry, just below superhard substances such as sapphire and diamond. Producing the cemented carbide molds without defects does appear possible, which is the main goal of this study, though some results vary.

Dragon

They call me Bruce

Machining
 
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Sound-based 3D printing
Concordia researchers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses sound waves to directly print tiny structures onto soft polymers like silicone with far greater precision than before. The approach, called proximal sound printing, opens new possibilities for manufacturing microscale devices used in health care, environmental monitoring and advanced sensors. It is described in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

3D printing in space

What happens to soft matter when gravity disappears? To answer this, UvA physicists launched a fluid dynamics experiment on a sounding rocket. The suborbital rocket reached an altitude of 267 km before falling back to Earth, providing six minutes of weightlessness.
In these six minutes, the researchers 3D-printed large droplets of a soft material similar to the inks used for bioprinting—a developing technology that shows huge potential for regenerative and personalized medicine, tissue engineering and cosmetics. Bioprinting involves 3D-printing a mix of cells and bio-inks or bio-materials in a desired shape, often to construct living tissues.

The experiment was called COLORS (COmplex fluids in LOw gravity: directly observing Residual Stresses). Using a special optical set-up, the researchers could see where the printed material experienced internal stresses (forces) as the droplets spread and merged. Stressed regions stand out as bright colors in the experiment. Investigating how and where these stresses emerge is important because they can get frozen in a material as it solidifies, creating weak points where 3D-printed objects are most likely to break.


3D print batteries
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There’s Always Room For 3D Printed Batteries

There are many applications where you have limits on how much you can cram into a particular space. There are also many applications where you need as much battery as you can get. At the intersecti…
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Thingiverse 2.0?
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MyMiniFactory Has Acquired Thingiverse Bringing Anti-AI Focus

One of the best parts of 3D printing is that you can freely download the plans for countless models from sites like Thingiverse, Printables, and others. Yet with the veritable flood of models on th…
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3D Printing Pneumatic Channels With Dual Materials For Soft Robots

Pneumatics are a common way to add some motion to soft robotic actuators, but adding it to a robot can be somewhat of a chore. A method demonstrated by [Jackson K. Wilt] et al. (press release, prep…
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Is That Ancient Reel Of PLA Any Good?

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 …
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Print flexibility

Scanning and graphics
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Scanning Table For The Professional Maker

Sometimes the simplest objects need some overthinking. This is exactly what [Chris Borge] realized when using his 3D scanner and finding that the included rotation table left quite a bit to be desi…
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Implementing 3D Graphics Basics

Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pockets…
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Real-Time 3D Room Mapping With ESP32, VL53L5CX Sensor And IMU

ST’s VL53L5CX is a very small 8×8 grid ranging sensor that can perform distance measurements at a distance of up to 4 meters. [Henrique Ferrolho] demonstrated that this little sensor ca…
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Thermoforming
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Thermoforming: Shaping Curvy Grilles With No Supports

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 therm…
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A New And Strangely Strong Kind Of Plastic

As anyone who extrudes plastic noodles knows, the glass transition temperature of a material is a bit misleading; polymers gradually transition between a glass and a liquid across a range of temper…
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LEGO motor
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Building The Most Simple Motor In Mostly LEGO

Although [Jamie’s Brick Jams] has made many far more complicated motor design in the past, it’s nice to go back to the basics and make a motor that uses as few parts as possible. This p…
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Manufacturing
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Lessons Learned After A Head-First Dive Into Hardware Manufacturing

Sometimes you just know that you have the best ever idea for a hardware product, to the point that you’re willing to quit your job and make said product a reality. If only you can get the pro…
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TRELLIS 2

TRELLIS.2: Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation

microsoft.github.io microsoft.github.io

Controversy

Sensors
To see if they could recreate this effect, the team 3D-printed artificial spines from plastic and ceramics. And when water flowed through them, they produced electricity.

In space
With a simple motion, a jack-in-the-box-like spring designed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed the potential of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to cut costs and complexity for futuristic space antennas. Called JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), the spring deployed on the small commercial spacecraft Proteus Space's Mercury One on Feb. 3, 2026. An onboard camera captured a video of the spring popping out of its container as the spacecraft passed over the Pacific Ocean in low-Earth orbit.
 
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Space prints
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A Nebula Straight From The Stars To Your Table

Space may truly be the final frontier, but maybe that frontier can be closer than you thought. Pictures of nebulae and planets bring the colorful sights of deep space right to your screen. You may …
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Super-Foam printed:

Aerojet

Strong, tiny prints

helps
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Use A Gap-Cap To Embed Hardware In Your Next 3D Print

Embedding fasteners or other hardware into 3D prints is a useful technique, but it can bring challenges when applied to large or non-flat objects. The solution? Use a gap-cap. The gap-cap technique…
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5 axis
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Multicolor 5-Axis 3D Printing

Usually, when we see non-planar 3D printers, they’re rather rudimentary prototypes, intended more as development frames than as workhorse machines. [multipoleguy]’s Archer five-axis printer, on the…
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Visi-Print

Tips
View: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/FQmhZI0r32Y
 
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