3-D Printed Gun Only Lasts Six Shots | Danger Room. A group of 3-D printing gunsmiths have taken another step toward making a gun you can download off the internet. This weekend, the desktop weaponeers took a partially printed rifle out to test how long its plastic parts survived spewing bullets. The result? Six rounds until it snapped apart. But that was also the point, the group’s founder tells Danger Room. “We knew it would break, probably,” says Cody Wilson, who heads the Wiki Weapon project. It’s the first live testing done by Wilson and Defense Distributed, the online collective that aims not only produce the world’s first fully 3-D printed gun, or “Wiki Weapon,” but create a clearinghouse for sharing weapons blueprints over the internet. The gun tested this weekend was not fully 3-D printed, only partially. But Wilson learned a few things about how to improve it. Wilson first fired one round to see if the gun worked, and then handed it to another member of the group.
For weeks, they haven’t been able to even start. The Mill | home | MakerBot Operators - Google Groupes. Skyfall Filmmakers 3D-Printed This Rare Aston Martin So They Wouldn't Damage the Original. Clever Cable Management Via 3D-Printed Shirt Button. Wearable electronics still aren't ready for primetime, but until they are, here's a clever bridge product: Shapeways user Egant's Button 2.0, which features a precisely-dimensioned groove in one side, providing handy cable-clipping capability for your headphones. It's totally one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-this head-smackers, but I have a feeling that as more and more of us get 3D printers, it won't matter.... Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web. Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing - Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution.
He spoke at a Wired "Culturazzi" event, at the Marriott Union Square and to sign copies of his latest book: "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. " Mr Anderson is always an excellent speaker and his talk covered the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, which he picked out as the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1764 - a hand powered machine for spinning yarn.
I'd have pinned the start of the Industrial Revolution to the invention of the steam engine and its ability to power large numbers of machines thus enabling the first factories - which represented aggregated labor energy. Scale makes factories viable. Today, Mr Anderson explained, there is Aliaba - an online registry of factories that will make anything for you.
More photos: More photos here. Join EFF’s Efforts to Keep 3D Printing Open. Thanks to the open hardware community, you can now have a 3D printer in your home for just a few hundred dollars, with dozens of printer models to choose from and build upon. Community-designed printers already outclass proprietary printers costing 30 times as much. This incredible innovation is possible because the core patents covering 3D printing technologies started expiring several years ago, allowing projects such as RepRap to prove what we already knew—that openness often outperforms the patent system at spurring innovation. Open hardware printers have been used for rapid prototyping of new inventions, to print replacement parts for household objects and appliances, by DIY scientists to turn a power drill into a centrifuge, for a game in which you can engineer your own pieces, and for thousands of other purposes by makers of all stripes.
The Problem The Project We've said before that the America Invents Act failed to address many of the patent system's worst problems. World's Largest 3D Printer Opens To Public. Sure, it’s cool that you can use 3D printing tech to fabricate, oh, say, that cute little wearable planter around your neck. But the future of 3D printing is bigger than that. Much bigger. Say, the size of whole house. On September 16, the Dutch architecture firm DUS unveiled the KamerMaker, which it has dubbed “the world’s first movable 3-D print pavilion.”
Fast CoExist reports that it’s the bigger, badder brother of DUS’s previous version, the Ultimaker, and it can spit out objects as large as 7.2 feet by 7.2 feet by 11.4 feet. That’s plenty big enough to print furniture on site, or perhaps even a room. In fact, what is believed to be the world’s first first entirely printed 3-D room will be finished by the KamerMaker this fall. image DUS Architects Such technology stands to revolutionize building and architecture, among other industries. Image via DUS Architects Another scenario where 3D-printed structures could prove handy is disaster relief. Wounded Eagle Gets New 3D Printed Beak. After being shot in the face by a poacher seven years ago, Beauty the bald eagle lost most of her beak. Without it, she couldn't feed herself, and likely would have died in the wild. But now, Beauty's getting a second chance at survival in the form of a 3D printed beak.
A team of researchers, engineers and dentists created the world's first prosthetic beak, which was modeled with CAD software and 3D-printed from nylon polymers. SEE ALSO: 3D Printing Gives Amputees Custom-Designed Legs [VIDEO] After a two-hour-long procedure, Beauty can now eat and drink by herself, though she's not ready to be released back into the wild.
The eagle remains at Birds of Prey Northwest, the conservation facility that spearheaded the recovery project. For more on Beauty and her 3D printed beak, check out the video above, and tell us what you think in the comments. Manufacturing: The third industrial revolution. THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services.
Towards a third dimension The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together. The applications of 3D printing are especially mind-boggling. Other changes are nearly as momentous.