As it turns out, there really is a great future in plastics.
“There’s nothing like working with plastic!” Marius Watz exclaimed to an appreciative crowd at the start of a recent talk in New York.
Watz, a Norwegian-born artist, was describing his work with the MakerBot, a consumer-grade, desktop-sized 3-D printer.
With some assembly and do-it-yourself tinkering, the MakerBot makes, or “prints,” three-dimensional objects from molten plastic, creating a piggy bank, say, or a Darth Vader head from a computer design at the touch of a button.
“I’d heard about 3-D printing in the ’90s, but at that time it sounded like some sci-fi technology – like laser guns,” Watz said. “Basically, it sounded totally awesome.”
Awesome was something of a buzzword recently at MakerBot’s inaugural open house at its warehouselike offices in New York, where Watz – the company’s first artist in residence – showed off his sculptural forms to a few dozen admirers and MakerBot owners, mostly guys in various stages of nerdy bliss.
After a burst of invention by three friends, the company was formed two years ago – “built on caffeine,” said a founder, Bre Pettis – and has since expanded to 32 employees and thousands of MakerBot kits sold.
Three-D printing has existed for years, but the machines were cumbersome and expensive, relegated to art and engineering schools, often monopolized by specialists.
The MakerBot, which tops out at about $1,300, gives anybody with a computer and an idea the same creative horsepower.
“It’s definitely baked into the DNA of MakerBot that this is a tool for creative people,” said Pettis, 38, who worked as a middle-school art teacher in Seattle before starting the company with Zach Hoeken Smith, 28, and Adam Mayer, 35, hardware and Web developers.
As part of their mission, the MakerBot’s founders also embrace sharing: Users are encouraged to post their designs for the machine on a company blog, Thingiverse, where anyone can have access to them, to print or modify.
“We’re obsessively open-source,” said Pettis, who, like many others in the MakerBot universe, speaks with the zeal of the technologically converted. “In this age of the Internet, the sharers are the people who will come out ahead – the people who make progress, then share it so that other people can stand on their shoulders.”
John Abeela – a MakerBot hobbyist from Huntington, N.Y., who attended the show and tell with a bin of objects – said the appeal is that “Everybody sees it with their own slant.”
“My wife’s friends look at it, and they ask me for cookie cutters in shapes that don’t exist,” said Abeela, who is employed in network security. “At work, people see it and say, ‘Can that replace the missing part in the company pingpong table?’”
(Probably, although the MakerBot has its limits: It can print objects that are, at most, 5 inches on a side, at relatively low resolution.)
Another hobbyist, Ed Hebel, made a carrying case for a single cigarette.
“I go out, and I don’t want to take a whole pack of cigarettes,” said the engineer from upstate New York, demonstrating his small holder.
“This is called a Lucy. I thought of this like two days ago. I thought for like 20 minutes, and I thought of this. And an hour later, I printed it.”
Some Bot artists are just excited about the machine’s practical applications.
David Bell and Joe Scarpulla have labored for years on a stop-motion animated film and photo series with an elaborate miniature set.
On a whim, Bell and Scarpulla bought a MakerBot – a CupCake model, which costs about $700 – and found it to be a good fit as a custom manufacturer.
“Our first successful prop was a miniature toilet bowl,” Bell said.
“We’re outfitting an entire apartment in one-eighth scale. So far, we’ve done sinks and light sockets, a bathtub and pots and pans.”
Source:http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2011/05/30/3-d-making-an-impression.html?sid=101
