Frankie's Readymake: Sand-casting 3-D Prints

A few weeks ago, Scott Kildall and I collaborated on the project Readymake: Duchamp Chess Set.  As part of our experiment, we invited various artists and makers to contribute documentation of their own iterations to the project.  Many awesome and talented people have been pitching in... and I am eager to publish a post dedicated to their readymakes in the near future.

However, one in particular I couldn't wait to share - mainly because the entire process is documented and I am a process JUNKIE.



Frankie Flood, best known in Milwaukee for his super power to shape and manipulate metal with his mind, has taken his readymake to the next level.  He has employed the age-old tradition of sand casting to transform once-plastic 3-D prints into robust bronze statuettes.

For the purpose of this post, I will attempt a lay-person's run-through of his process (with photos stolen from Flood's blog.)

Step One: Obtain large metal sand-casting mold thingie.

Step Two: Obtain smelting furnace and graphite crucible.

Step Three: Play in tiny sand box.

Step Four: Half-Bury 3-D Print in tightly-packed sand.

Step Five: Apply corn starch (who knew?) as a release-agent.

Step Six: Bury 3-D print alive, pack tightly.

Step Seven: Remove 3-D print, leaving empty cavity in the shape of said 3-D print.

Step Eight: Snack Break!  Prepare sandwich as pictured above.

Step Nine: Use furnace to melt desired material (bronze, aluminum, cheese, etc)

Step Ten: Be Frankie Flood.

Step Eleven: Pour stuff in thingie.

Step Twelve: Separate.

 Step Thirteen: Receive degree in Alchemy.

For the real deal, plus way more photos, plus Flood's take on combining new technologies with old craft traditions, check out his blog posts, here, here and here!

Arduino workshop @ Stritch

This month I hosted a three-night Arduino workshop at Cardinal Stritch University, open to all students and focusing primarily in basic circuits, introduction to creative coding, and making stuff!  The (small) group of students who attended ended up collaborating on the following:

The Draphon: A robotic dragon-dolphin hybrid.  I was actually pretty impressed that in just three two-hour sessions, and with no prior experience in circuits+coding, these guys were able to pool efforts to create a functional robotic object!  Demo video below:

Cubecube!

I finally released my new open-source project, Cubecube.  In collaboration with Kavi Laud, this hardware project explores one possibility for creating 3-D computer models by manipulating real-world objects with your hands.

 Kavi and I launched the official website/wiki for the project (cubecu.be), and I created a build-guide and published on Instructable.com (here).

This project features one of my first professionally-fabbed circuit boards, which I was pretty stoked to unbox.  I ordered it through Fritzing.org, the company whose software I also used to design the board.

This project also features some of the trickiest and smallest assemblies I've ever designed, like the inside of a building block (pictured above).

This project is still very much in progress, but now that it is (finally) documented and published online, I plan on taking a break from it for a few months, maybe the summer.  So many other fun things to make in the mean time!

Keep your eyes peeled at cubecu.be for updates!

Capacitive touch lamp: progress

The last few days I've been finding time to work on my new capacitive touch lamp design. It's been so great to work at a faster pace on something!  This design process has been much faster and more intuitive than other projects currently in progress, as I've already made a rough prototype and am really just tidying things up.

The new design features a 3D printed "core" - a plastic chassis that houses the circuit and LED strip, while serving to reinforce the walls of the lamp from the inside.

The series will be constructed of bamboo (in honor of the trip China trip this project is raising money for!) but while I waited for materials to arrive in the mail from inventables.com, I created a mockup with some spare cast acrylic I had left over from a past project.

These lamps will also feature a number of changeable "face plates" - laser-etched images to be illuminated by the LED series.  The grumpy cat pictured above is just a test graphic - I havent quite settled on what the final plates will look like.

The bamboo plywood sheets actually arrived earlier today.  Between prepping for tomorrow's classes, I managed to put together a quick test model:

I'm quite happy with how this new design goes together, but there is still much to tweak.  Soon enough I'll be ready to start programming some colorful led action!

Resurrecting Dead Objects

A few months ago the talented and brilliant Scott Kildall contacted me about collaborating on a project where we'd be resurrecting objects that have been lost - in this case Marcel Duchamp's favorite hand-carved chess set.  This set no longer exists save the archival photograph pictured above.

The idea was not only to rebuild the lost objects, but to release open-source digital files to be 3D-printed by anyone interested in resurrecting the objects for themselves.  In homage to the original set's owner, we decided to call this kind of re-animated, re-configured and re-claimed object a "Readymake."

Scott posted a great write-up of this project on his blog - check it out here if you are interested in learning more about the concept behind our first Readymake.  I'm going to dedicate the rest of this post to the process behind giving new life to these wonderful lost objects.

I began the recreation of each piece by extracting a two-dimensional drawing directly from the archival photograph.  The next step was to pull the drawings into three dimensions via a handful of CAD processes. Many of the pieces, like the queen pictured above, were given depth by a simple revolved extrude.

Other pieces required a few extra steps.  Here I am recreating the king's "crown" with a series of extrudes and cuts, using geometry again pulled from the photograph.

The knight was by far the most challenging piece to model - both because of its complex curves and details - but also because much of the form was left to my assumptions due to the profile view in the photograph.  I began this drawing a bit differently - starting this time with a drawing of the knight's basic curves.

I managed to find a photo of a 1967 work by Duchamp titled "Marcel Duchamp moulé vif" where he included a bronze cast of the knight from his set.  This image, the only other geometrical data I could find of this piece, helped guide me through dimensioning the rest of the model.

After fleshing out the basic form of the knight via a series of lofted and swept extrusions, I began to add details.

Because of the grain of the photo, the relatively low-resolution of my digital copy, and the lighting the photographer used to document the original set, much of the finer details in the knights face were left to my imagination.

With the knight modeled, the digital set was complete and ready for the first round of test-prints.  Scott, who's currently artist-in-residence at Autodesk's Instructables, began to experiment with their high-end Objet series printers:

These pieces came out beautifully - I especially love the clear resin prints.  See more images of Scott's set here.

While I don't have access to fancy high-end 3D printers, I do have a few desktop FDM printers.  I began with a test print of the knight on my custom-built Rep Rap Prusa I3 machine.  I printed the above knight as a test to see how it would come out without any support material.  It was relatively successful, which means anyone with a homebrew printer will be able to paticipate in this Readymake experiment!

Satisfied with the no-support version, I decided to re-print the knight, and the rest of the set with support material, using the Up! Plus printer I won from the Instructables.com Make it Real Challenge a few years back.

The results were great:

This project is still very much in progress, but I've made the digital files for the tentative design available on Thingiverse, here, for anyone who is interested in printing their own Readymake: Duchamp Chess Set!

If you do print one, please be sure to share images of your "make" on Thingiverse!