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Doctor WHOokies – Holiday Baking with Makerbot

02 Jan

Finding the perfect shape for cookies has never been easier than it is with Makerbot. After printing a copy of an amazing TARDIS cookie cutter for a friend I thought I’d try my hand at fancy decorative baking, not my usual project but I think it turned out well.

I followed the receipe from Nigella Lawson with some minor changes. Here’s my version:

Cookies

Uncle Chris’ Fancy Vanillin Extract

3D printed TARDIS cookie cutter

bottle blue gel paste food coloring

Frosting

1. Cream the butter and sugar until it’s fluffy. Add a small amount of food coloring (start with less than you think you’ll need, coloring strength can vary and while you can always add-to you can’t take-out), mix thoroughly adding more food coloring if necessary to achieve desired color. Mix in eggs & vanilla extract.
2. Combine flour, salt and baking soda in a large bowl, then stir into wet mix.
3. Split dough into 2 flat discs and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
4. Pre-heat oven to 350
5. Lightly flour work surface and rolling pin. Roll 1 disc of dough to 1/4″ thick and cut with cookie cutters.
6. Bake 8-12 minutes
7. When cookies are fully cooled, mix hot water and confectioners sugar in a bowl. Apply with a piping bag or a zip-top bag with the corner cut off.

: Gathering the ingredients

: Adding sugar and butter

: Creamed butter with blue food coloring

: Adding the dry ingredients

: Icing ingredients

: Pressing the pattern into the cut cookie

: A tray of cookies ready for the oven

: Baked and iced cookies

: TARDIS cookie glamour shot

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Posted in cooking, makerbot

Signing 3D Prints

28 Dec

Usually once someone has a copy your STL for 3D printing it’s pretty difficult to keep your name attached to it, but I think I’ve found a way to fix that. I’ve been kicking around the idea of physically marking my digital designs but hadn’t until recently found a practical way to do it.

I had looked into subtracting a logo or initials on the bottom of my prints but leaving an outline in the first few layers. Unfortunately this wasn’t always practical depending on your intended application for the part. So I took the idea of “stamping” a design into the bottom of the part and moved it up and into the center of my print.

Taking my username’s initials I sized the letters to fit within the structure of the print. The letters are 1.0mm in height which at my current layer height of 0.3 mm prints 3 layers of initials in the print before covering the top and continuing the print. Pictured in the header image of this post is a finished print that includes my initials inside. You really can’t see any evidence of my initials on the completed print so it doesn’t really modify the intended appearance of the peice. However if you’re printing the part yourself you will see my print “sign” itself with my initals about 25% into the print.

While this “digital/physical signature” isn’t impossible to remove I think it’s a good way for anyone from artists, engineers, and hobbyists to make their mark on their 3D designs. It’s pretty cool to watch this being printed as you can see in the video below. It’s almost like a secret message from the model’s creator. I think it would be pretty cool to see logos or initials “sign themselves” in the middle of more prints that I grab off the internet. It’s a good way to connect the cool object you’re printing with the cool person that designed it and you really don’t need to do anything to see it, it tells you who made it while it’s printing!

[thingiverse thing=39497]

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Posted in makerbot

If you’ve got it, print it

08 Nov

I hadn’t intended the SketchUp model I made for my previous post “Wooden Beer Totes” to be used for 3D printing. I was using it as a way to figure out how much wood to buy at the hardware store. But once I have my hands on a 3D model it’s usually hard to keep me from attempting to print it.

I took the original reference model and updated it so it was a printable solid. I also made a few changes to accommodate the overhangs in the original model.

After scaling it to fit my Thing-o-Matic’s build platform I found that it was the perfect size to hold tiny Tabasco bottles! Now it’s adorable AND useful.

[thingiverse thing=34067]

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Posted in makerbot

Making a Wedding: Boutonnières

02 Nov

Well I’m doing it, I’m getting married this month. We’ve picked a brewery as our venue and unsurprisingly I’ve decided I want to make as many things myself as possible for the event. One of the things I picked to create was the boutonnieres for myself and my groomsmen.

Since the wedding was at a brewery I thought it would be fun to carry the theme into the boutonnieres and make them look like ethanol molecules. I found a 3D rendering of the molocule on Wikipedia which looked nice enough. After rotating and spacing out the parts so it looked more visually pleasing the only problem was modeling.

I primarily use Google Sketchup for modeling but it’s really not great for organic modeling (or at least I’m not any good at it). I ended up using Tinkercad to model this. It’s a great web based solid modeler that makes creating printable objects a breeze. The model is available on Tinkercad as well as uploaded to Thingiverse (Tinkercad exports directly to Thingiverse, how cool is that?)

I loaded these up on my Makerbot and ran off a batch of 10 boutonnieres. Because I modeled them to print without support material they only took about 15 minutes each to print. The lack of support material also meant there was virtually no clean up needed on the part after printing. After I had my 10 boutonnieres printed I used some superglue to attach pinbacks to each one and they were ready to go!

: freshly printed

: Pinbacks attached to prints

: The completed set

[thingiverse thing=33623]

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Posted in makerbot, wedding

Making a Wedding: Flowers

10 Oct

When my fiance Melissa and I started planning our wedding last September we knew it wasn’t going to be cookie cutter. We decided to include some personal additions that we just couldn’t get elsewhere to make the day our own and at the same time save money.

Here’s one example. Instead of buying bouquets for the wedding we decided to use our combined talents to create something that was not only skirted the norm but would also last quite a long time. We combined 3D printed parts from my Makerbot and crocheted flowers to create a rather unique bouquet for the bridesmaids.

The crochet pattern was found on allcrafts.net HERE. After a couple of trial runs (one of which she was pretty unhappy with because she rolled it WAY too tightly) each flower only took about 15 minutes to make.

For the 3D printed parts I was inspired by “Rose” by JoeyE on Thingiverse. While this wasn’t exactly what I was looking for it was a good jumping off point in figuring out how to design something that looked both organic and digital.

In the gallery below you’ll find the original prints as well as my painting process. I used white Rustoleum Universal which does a great job covering printed ABS parts. It gave it a nice off white color.

Once all the flowers were done Melissa took over the project again. She covered bouquet forms we picked up at our local crafts store with suiting material from my Mom, wrapped the handle in the grey yarn from the flowers, and finally arranged the flowers on the form. Using hot glue to secure everything to the form made this last step fly by.

I’ve uploaded the flower files to Thingiverse for printing for Valentines Day, birthdays, anniversarys, and who knows maybe even other Maker weddings. Next up? Groomsmen Boutonnieres!