Free Republic

In what may be one of the biggest stories we have covered this year, a new company, Carbon3D has just emerged out of stealth mode, unveiling an entirely new breakthrough 3D printing process, which is anywhere between 25 and 100 times faster than what’s available on the market today.The privately-held Redwood City, California-based company, Carbon3D, was founded in 2013, and since then has been secretly perfecting a new 3D printing technology which promises to change the industry forever. The technology that the company calls Continuous Liquid Interface Production technology (CLIP) works by harnessing the power of light and oxygen to...

If you’ve been reading our site for longer than a couple of weeks, then you likely have figured out that we are obsessed with 3D printing. Why are we so obsessed with this technology? Because we truly believe that 3D printing will change the world we all live in, mostly for the better, and the quicker this happens the better off we all will be. Although I, personally, became aware of 3D printing about half a decade ago, I didn’t really understand it or venture to explore the various applications of the technology until only about two years ago. Soon...

In the short amount time that we have been covering this industry, we have reported on many amazing 3D printing related projects being undertaken by various individuals and companies around the globe. There have been 3D printed cars, 3D printed apartment buildings, and even an entire 3D printed estate that is expected to be erected in New York sometime this year. However, when we were contacted by a man named Tops Nicol, the research founder of the Alphaseed project, we were truly blown away.  “Science is fascinating and its latest growth in all branches of scientific research has helped...

The wonders of 3D printing, and the technology’s potential to revolutionize the world of manufacturing, have thrilled entrepreneurs, tinkerers, government officials and the business community. However, the 3D technology has a potential dark side too in the form of 3D printing of weapons, not only is there a threat of fanatic element making use of the technology to procure 3D weapons, but on a more concerning note, there are strong chances that such weapons may easily escape the various security detection tests and could be used to devastating effect in public places. In 2013, a United States Department of Homeland...

What will 3D printers ultimately evolve into? No one has a functioning crystal ball in front of them I assume, but a good guess would be a machine which can practically build anything its user desire, all on the molecular, and eventually atomic levels. Sure we are likely multiple decades away from widespread molecular manufacturing, but a group of chemists led by medical doctor Martin D. Burke at the University of Illinois may have already taken a major step in that direction. Burke, who joined the Department of Chemistry at the university in 2005, heads up Burke Laboratories where he...

Need an obscure medicinal compound found only in a jungle plant? Just print it.Say you're a medical researcher interested in a rare chemical produced in the roots of a little-known Peruvian flower. It's called ratanhine, and it's valuable because it has some fascinating anti-fungal properties that might make for great medicines. Getting your hands on the rare plant is hard, and no chemical supplier is or has ever sold it. But maybe, thanks to the work of University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, you could print it right in the lab. In a new study published in the journal Science...

Who says that you can’t make anything useful on a desktop 3D printer? Sure, there are plenty of designs that you can find on 3D printing repository websites which make you question the motive of the designers — but at the same time, there are engineers and designers creating things that make you just stop and say, “WOW!” One of these latter instances comes in the form of a 3D printed 5-speed transmission for a Toyota 22RE engine, created by a mechanical engineer named Eric Harrell of Santa Cruz, California. Not only does it look legitimate, but it also is...

The Škorpion vz. 61 is a very recognizable submachine gun that garnered a following due to its representation in video games and movies. First designed in 1959, this Czechoslovak firearm is also available in semiautomatic versions. However, the semiautomatic variants can be a bit hard to find, and unless you are capable of milling your own lower receiver for one, many fans will have a difficult time getting their hands on a working Škorpion. That is, unless you know how to work a 3D printer. The enthusiasts in this video used a demilled receiver to design their blueprint for this...

Laura Bosworth wants to 3D print breast nipples on demand. The CEO of the Texas startup TeVido Biodevices is betting on a future in which survivors of breast cancer who have undergone mastectomies will be able to order up new breasts printed from their own living cells. “Everyone,” she says, “knows a woman who has had breast cancer.” Right now their options are limited. Reconstructed nipples using state-of-the-art plastic surgery techniques, she says, “tend to flatten and fade and don’t last very long.” A living nipple built from the patient’s own fat cells, and reconstructed to the precise specification of...

A couple of forward-thinking engineering students from the University of British Columbia have put together a little machine that grinds up used plastics and turn them into usable filaments for 3D-printing. It’s called the ProtoCycler, and it’ll generate a kilogram spool of filament for free (negating the cost of electricity of course) if you have some soda pop bottles lying around. The concept behind the 3D-printer add-on was simple—combine a filament extruder and plastic grinder into one contraption. (COMPARISON-CHART-AT-LINK)The ProtoCycler can churn out 10 feet of filament a minute, which makes it the fastest extruder on the market according to...

The 3D printing industry is still very much in its infancy. But that could change if the CIA has its way. The intelligence agency's venture capital firm just invested in Voxel8, the company behind the first multi-material, 3D electronics printer. What does the CIA want with 3D printing? We can only guess at this point, but we may hear stories one day of how some futuristic James Bond 3D-printed his own gadgets in the field. What's the potential impact for consumers? The move might just jumpstart a field that has so far been struggling to find its footing. Voxel8 says...

Three-dimensional printing has been used to make everything from pizza to prostheses, and now researchers are working on using the emerging technology to fabricate hearts, kidneys, and other vital human organs. That would be very big news, as the number of people who desperately need an organ transplant far outstrips the number of donor organs available. On average, about 21 Americans die every day because a needed organ was unavailable. What exactly is the promise of 3D printing organs and tissues, or "bioprinting?" How does the technology work, and when might it start saving lives? For answers to these and...

It isnÂ’t often that you come across new 3D printers that utilize an entirely new concept which hasnÂ’t been seen within this industry as of yet. With todayÂ’s technology, we are able to 3D print objects in hundreds of different materials, but when it comes to printing with metals, most of these machines are out our price ranges. 3D metal printers are mainly reserved for large corporations, as they come with price tags in excess of $250,000. However, as technology advances, we may one day soon be able to 3D print metal objects from the comfort of our own homes,...

Concrete is an amazing building material: cheap to create, strong when used correctly, and hard-wearing, too. But turning it into exotic and shapely forms can be prohibitively complex and expensive. Now, a 3D printer capable of producing one-off moulds as large as a phone booth could help turn architectural dreamw into affordable reality. The Engineer reports that a collaboration between 3Dealise, a 3D engineering company, and Bruil, a construction company, has spawned the new device. The pair claim that the machine—pictured below—can "create irregularly curved surfaces, lightweight half-open mesh or honeycomb structures, and even ornamental craftwork." The printer is used...

MELBOURNE, Feb. 26 (UPI) — Researchers have 3-D printed everything from animal prosthetics and human teeth to whole cars, but now a university in Australia has tackled printing two jet engines. A group of researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University, in conjunction with Deakin University and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), used a large 3-D printer to manufacture the two engines.

A printer was once just a printer, dispensing paper sheets with printed material made from the ink stored within. But today, a printer has evolved to becoming a small-scale manufacturer that 'prints' out anything from human organs to affordable meals to guns. For instance, the XYZPrinting 3D Food Printer, exhibited at the recent CES 2015 in Las Vegas, is expected to print any style of uncooked cookies and other dough-based pastries in minutes. Not exactly as affordable as any other food processor, the printer ranges between $500 and $1,900 and prints food that measures around 5000 cubic cm by volume....

The Mark One 3D printer from MarkForged caused a bit of a sensation last January when it was announced that it could extrude continuous fiber using the FFF process.The Mark One 3D printer, featuring a build volume of 320 x 132 x 160 mm, can print using carbon fiber, Kevlar, fiberglass, and nylon, and in doing so creates very strong parts. Now 3 HTi has announced they’ll be offering, through a partnership with the Cambridge, MA-based MarkForged, the Mark One 3D printer as one of the first companies authorized to sell the revolutionary technology. 3 HTi is a technology solutions...

Elon Musk isn’t afraid to shake things up, and he did so again with accusations that US defense contracts awarded to a competitor were the product of corruption. SpaceX, Musk’s orbital transport firm, has been competing for a major contract to put US Air Force satellites in orbit. With a dearth of private investment in space and the end of the US space shuttle program, SpaceX has quickly leapt to the fore of aerospace firms with the help of contracts from NASA to provide re-supply missions to the International Space Station and develop a manned spacecraft to fly astronauts there....

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. While it's certainly impressive that Elon Musk has bachelor's degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, it's an absurd understatement to say that prepared him to run SpaceX, his spacecraft company. Jim Cantrell, who was an aerospace consultant at the time, became SpaceX's first VP of business development and Musk's industry mentor when the company launched in 2002. He says that Musk literally taught himself rocket science by reading textbooks and talking to industry heavyweights.

We’ve seen an incredible amount of research hours and dollars being poured into an area where the ‘miracle material’ graphene converges with what some may call a ‘miracle technology’ in 3D printing. In this space, a whole slew of groundbreaking applications and processes may emerge as a better understanding of graphene, and how to 3D print it come about. We’ve discussed a company called Graphene 3D Lab in the past. They have been producing a graphene nanocomposite filament for typical FDM/FFF 3d printers. The problem with this filament, however, is the fact that most of the desirable properties of graphene,...