From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Sun Jan 19 2003 - 23:37:34 MST
Unfortunately I deleted the relevant email, but in one of the 3D printer posts someone referred to his dad making gun and golf club parts from a 3D printer (think it was wax/polymer layers) currently, using AUTOCAD for design, with good accuracy for wax models for molds.
It makes one wonder whether this feature in conjunction with the scanners available (one machine I read of mapped 100,000 points on a human body shape, this may not be much now???) ought to be great for making, mapping and distributing sculptural art including for buildings (relief blocks for facades) including non-bronze materials. Also, I was wondering whether the print could actually alternate between a solid and a meltable 3-D dot, so you could either make the mold itself rather than the product and then the mold from that (I'm assuming the printing process itself is more expensive and slower than an injection mold). In other words a cube (or some other shell) is produced around the empty space that is the mold (produced through some technique like heating and draining away the wax-polymer, leaving the other-material (carbon-based?). Surely people must be doing this sort of stuff already? With automated and cheap molding materials to inject you'd expect a bonanza of production akin to that which has transformed everything from sign-writing to cake decoration, with prints and labels and and laser-cut computer-generated foam and metal, stick-ons, clothing design etc. etc. etc..
Avatar Polymorph
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