http://widgets.nbc.com/o/47f1317f105...a4377d3bfd6c81

Real or April Fools?

I think it's fake. How is that scanner going to fully scan something that is assembled and have it still function. It can't possibly scan every nook and cranny while assembled? It can't hit every aspect of the object because something will always be covered up by another part or whatever. Now, if you take every piece and scan it part by part, that's different.

Nope, it's real (I think- didn't have time to watch the whole video). The guy I brew beer with does this for a living. It is the weirdest thing to get your head around at first. He has "printed" a set of gears that are locked together but are able to spin. You could print a ship in a bottle or anything like that. I am not smart enough to explain how, but basically he creates 3d images in the computer and it prints thin layers of the object. His machine can print up to an 18" square piece at a time.
Architects and city planners commission his work often. He creates 3d topo map images and the detail is incredible. The crankshaft (like the crescent wrench in the video) on his website is one print job, but it turns & moves. Weird stuff.

www.realize3d.com

I say real. Saw this on TV quite some time ago and if it's on TV it's for real.

we had the same set up in college. as a final project I built a set of working planetary gears in auto cad and the printed them in the rapid proto-typer. When you watching the video, during the part where they are showing the wrench they made, you can see two different colors of material. The white is plastic and the brown support which is soluble and is only there to 'support' / fill hollow areas for the white plastic.


Wanderer, in the example of the steam valve they scanned, it was an easy shape with no hollow insides to detail. All of the faces were visible to the laser scanner. If the part were more complex and had internal voids, the operator would have to use a computer program to add that information for the computer to print, but it wouldn't take a great deal of time.

Bump??? (Is that how you computer kids say it?)

That just blew my mind.

I used to work in the 3D Computer Graphics industry for a couple of decades and watched this technology when it first came out in the mid-90's. That steam engine that Jay Leno held up wasn't scanned all at once, they scanned the separate pieces, then used a CAD program to put it together before building the plastic model. Or maybe build the whole model with a CAD program. It's cool that the plastic "copier" can generate something that's assembled, but you can't produce the same thing in metal. The more important reason why this technology is good is because they can generate the part that Jay needed for his steam car, check that the plastic one fits properly, then use the same file in a CNC milling machine and make the final one.

Are there some KLR pieces that you guys were thinking of having made that way?

I'm thinking medical applications. My uncle just had a voicebox implanted. For those of us that don't work in the industry...man, I would have believed Jay Leno could fly before I believed that was possible.

Dave, we totally should have thought of this. I blame the Black and Tans.

http://www.geekologie.com/2010/07/pr...ts_digital.php

I blame Ted Nugent and my old fashioned telephone bong....MIT just wasn't in my cards I suppose.

Dave