Last week Ethan said something to the effect of “no, it’s too much to ask for a model of a 4-piston engine with a crank shaft,” so naturally, here it is.  Never doubt the ‘verse.

How do you make something as awesome as a Mario Kart turtle shell racer cover even cooler?  Make it run gearmotors of course!  Sublime works up a quick set of conversion plates to form the ground work of, well, just about anything, so long as it’s a moving turtle shell.  Well, actually you could in principle use this to mount gear motors onto anything that’d fit on the original car base…

Really neat GE tie-in stuff, huh?  I’m really excited to see if Thingiverse becomes one of those places everyone “needs to have a strategy for”.  Of course in the mean time it’s just fun seeing Thingiverse be a platform for cute social media.

One of the more consistently-overpriced bits of plastic out there are science demos, and the exact thing you’re after might not even exist.  This cubic crystal model is just gorgeous though, and I bet the other crystal types wouldn’t be too difficult to assemble either…

It’s been a while since I talked about economics here, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an economic effect Ray Kurzweil pointed out a while ago (but didn’t name) where rapidly advancing technology tends to create a bunch of stuff which a few years ago would have been priceless but which now has virtually zero street value.  He pointed out that this was deflationary (a dollar buys a lot more, at least of what’s advancing) and that this wasn’t well modeled in current economic theory, because unlike classical capital deflation, nothing has “worn out” to make it cheaper.

I think we’re seeing a lot of that lately, not just with processing technology (although this is a key enabling technology to all home 3D printers and Thingiverse itself) but also with fabrication technology in that anything you can make on a home 3D printer rapidly shoots to a price point that has to do with per-pound plastic and the local cost of electricity.

This tends to synergize with the lowering cost of information technologies into things like the above spherical display.  The value in the things that have become so cheap hasn’t gone away at all– it’s just become easier to get.

Ah, the multiple-pulley arrangement.  One of those classic physics problems that teaches the value of having mechanical advantage, and these entirely functional pulleys demonstrate not only how to turn a little force over a large distance into a large force over a little distance, but how cool it is to have a 3D printer as well.  Steve Wall’s design includes some additional parts and fiddling, so check out his instructions when building this thing!

Red Bull’s Thingiverse page also makes me feel pretty positive towards them.  Energy drinks are kind of natural allies of the Maker community, aren’t they?

It’s one thing to sit back and think about how you could take ABS parts into the oceanic depths if you needed to– it’s something else entirely to actually do it!  Scott Pierce gives us the model files of the mounting bracket (are there no two things a good 3D printed bracket can’t bring together?) he built to attach his underwater camera to his diving mask!  ABS plastic is presumably good to a depth of whatever its crushing pressure is at your infill ratio…

(I do try to limit puns usually, but I figure every now and then I’m allowed to indulge.)

I always love it when Slashdot mentions 3D printing, and I really like this article in particular for bringing up the long-term macroeconomic issues that are coming with better personal fabrication tools.  I also like how the first comment on this post mentions the notorious “world market of five computers” quote, which I agree completely, applies here.

Via Slashdot, natch.