Few scents truly bring back the golden age of my childhood. Chocolate pudding, fruit roll-ups, and scented markers are high up on that list, but few can meet the powerhouse that is Play-Doh. To this day, if I ever catch a whiff of the colorful fun stuff I am instantly and without warning thrown into…

After having raised over $8 million on Kickstarter ($8,596,474 to be exact) from the original goal of $950,000, the wildly successful OUYA open-source video game console will be launching with a bang from San Francisco this week. In celebration of the launch, OUYA teamed up with MakerBot and Thingiverse to offer the option to 3D…

Having recently been approved for a Type 7 Federal Firearms Licence (FFL), Cody Wilson just can’t seem to stay out of the news these days (not that he has a problem with that). Currently Wilson is awaiting his early-April approval for his Class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer (SOT) add-on which will allow him to manufacture…

For those in the greater London area, get ready to see a whole lot more 3D printing buzz. Today, iMakr announced that it will be opening a two-story, 2500 square-foot 3D printing retail store in Farringdon in Central London. Could this be the ‘office supply store’ of the future? Take off your Google Glass at…

This week we have the great pleasure to speak with the one and only Conor MacCormack, CEO and Co-founder of MCor Technologies, makers of the paper-based 3D printer currently in use at Staples locations around Europe. We’ll talk with Conor about what led him into the 3D printing industry and how he even thought to…

And now for your daily feel-good story. Colin Macduff, a Washington State Navy veteran who did two tours in Operation Desert Shield accidentally blew off his finger in a shotgun accident in 2010. At the time, Macduff was unemployed and according to his doctor, would be unable to receive a prosthetic. What resulted belongs in…

Lasers vs. plastic extruders. We all know laser cutters are superior to 3D printers. Mostly, because you can’t put plastic extruders on sharks (or any other sea creature) to make them even more vicious. It also turns out that laser cutters are a tad faster at fabricating certain items…. as long as it’s flat and…

When you’re thinking sleek and sexy materials, concrete probably isn’t the first thing that crosses your mind. High-density foam and corduroy–now those are some right sexy materials, amiright? Nonetheless, more experimentation to take concrete beyond the foundation and into fashion (??) should be happening… we think. IVANKA is a Budapest-based design studio and concrete factory…

Since the days of Bo Jackson, cross-training has been seeing more exposure in the limelight. More recently, popular workout programs such as CrossFit have been demanding more from a shoe than just a comfortable running capability. Movements such as lateral cuts and jumping require completely separate needs from your run-of-the-mill existing high-end running shoe. The…

In the case that you love watching products turn on a lathe as much as I do, you are in mucho luck today. Product designer Ingo Schuppler has recently released the lathe-heavy process video for his latest design, “Schwarzes Gold’. The coal-based lamp design is in response to Germany’s energy usage and, according to the…

It seems like only a couple days ago SolidSmack was reporting on Cody Wilson and his move to ‘revolutionize’ 3D Printing with DEFCAD.com. Well, the resilient 3D printing poster boy for 3D printed firearms is back in the news again after having recently received his Type 7 Federal Firearms License granting him the ability to…

Microsoft just put on the transparent face masks, lined up the sensors and released an updated version of the Kinect SDK. To the high-pitched squeals of (some) developer’s delight, Kinect for Windows SDK 1.7, along with an updated developer toolkit and new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), is available on the Kinect for Windows website. It’s…

Invisible Light Network, an NYC-based creative studio specializing in interactive and experience design presented a 3D printing project at this year’s SXSW festival’s #FEED event. The #FEED event featured a number of artists and designer-types who combine the best of music and interactive art into a showcase of incredible experiences and innovative products. We had…

Are there not enough 3D creation, development and collaboration apps on the web? No sir, no there are not. Especially apps that take an approach that combines both the block-addicting fun of Minecraft and the web-modeling ease of Tinkercad. BrickItUp plans to take on the feat, they’re almost there and they have a Kickstarter campaign…

This week we have the great pleasure to speak with Max Bogue. Max is a co-founder of Wobbleworks and he, as well as fellow co-founder Peter Dillworth have created the 3Doodler, the world’s first 3D printed pen. They have a fully-funded Kickstarter project and there’s still time to get in on it. Now, these guys…

When we previously reported on those cool Sandboxr dudes, they were prepping to launch their super cool model building and 3D printing app. Well, that time has arrived folks and Sandboxr has just launched their Kickstarter campaign to make the app and sandstone-3D printing experience a reality for non-CAD users all over the world…and a…

Law student, gun owner, and 3D printing fan Cody Wilson has spent much of the last year working on 3d printed gun parts and setting up Defense Distributed, a sharing platform setup to help himself and others manufacture and share these printable gun parts. The result of 3D printed gun parts being usable in otherwise…

When high-school students get bored it can only lead to one thing… The design of a new, fully-articulating prosthetic leg made from bike parts that cost a fraction of a professionally manufactured leg. Parker Owen’s Saturday night boredom turned into looking at picture on the Internet… pictures of bicycle schematics and prosthetic design. Now, he…

You recall Makerbot’s Shapeshot that grabs shots of your cranial casing and meshes it in mere seconds for you to print? Well, low and behold, Makerbot has now announced their desktop 3D scanner, the Makerbot Digitizer. Bre Pettis announced the news of the prototype on stage at the keynote kicking off this year’s SXSW event,…

This week we have the great pleasure to speak with the one and only Chuck Cage, founder of the uber-rockin’ tool blog Toolmonger.com—-the ‘world’s first tool blog’ as a matter fact.

It was just a couple days ago that we reported on Nike’s 3D printed American Football cleat that’s specifically engineered to help professional athletes boost their 40-yard dash times. The significance of the cleat rests in the designers’ decision to use 3D printing as a final form of manufacturing (SLS). However, 3D printing is nothing…

Previously, explaining the concept of 3D printing to those at dinner parties who are perhaps two steps behind with technology may have involved awkwardly moving your hands around the air to mimic a print head squirting out fresh ABS juice. Perhaps you can save those skillz for another time and just pass along this perfect…

Why would you need a flexible 11 gear mobius strip? Well, let me ask you this. Why would you NOT? 11 adjoining hypoid gears, plus the added benefit of poloidal rotation… you just never know when that’s going to come in handy in a tight situation. Thanks to Blake Courter you can have that 11…

No, it’s not a new band bringing back the horn-infused, Caribbean-upbeat swing. It’s a scanner to bring you and your environment into 3d space on the cheap. Manctl has released version 1.0 and a subsequent 1.1 version of Skanect, a new scanning software that turns your Xbox or Windows Kinect scanner into and 3d-tracing tool…

Having recently been voted as Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company of 2013, Nike is keeping the bar raised high with the announcement of their (SLS) 3D printed football cleat today. 3D printers have been used for years in the development of various components of performance athletic shoes, but in terms of 3D printing as a…

Airbnb has been one of the more famous startups in recent memory with their original ‘Air Bed and Breakfast’ idea: connecting empty bedrooms and guest houses to travelers and offering extra cash for those opening their homes to strangers. Many who have opened their homes to travelers have found so much success with Airbnb that…

In a recent TEDYouth talk, Tom Chi (Head of Special Projects at Google) spoke to wide-eyed young’uns about the process and theory behind developing a product experience for Google that overlays digital information and images onto the physical world.

Max and Pete are high-fiving a million angels right about now (in between all the responses and project updates they’re sending out) for what’s turning into one of the most breakaway successes in Kickstarter history. In only a few hours, the project hit the $30,000 goal and over the past day, they’ve passed $1.3 Million.…

Just after Sandboxr was scheduled to launch their own creature creator app February 1st, Autodesk has sprouted another tentacle from its 123D app portfolio and introduced Autodesk 123D Creature. Yes, you can model your own creature in the discomfort of an office chair during a meeting, but guess what? You can also send it off…

148 brains have been drained of their futuristic spacecraft-inventing potential over the last month. Who is to blame? Makerbot and GrabCAD. The Makerbot Replicator 2 Design Challenge just finished up at GrabCAD and the winners have been selected. The challenge was to create a 2040 vehicle design. Most of the entries are fabulous designs and…

Strap on your sea legs and spin up the laser cutter. Nautical charts are some of the best types of prints to plaster on the wall to give off an air of eclectic charm. You can, however, bump it up a notch with versions made out of wood, layers and layers of silky laser-cut wood.…

As if 2013 couldn’t get any better folks, EngineerVsDesigner is BACK! Yes we caught a few fishes but mainly we slayed the dragons and drank hot toddies. Now that we’re back, it’s time to get the party started with an individual who not only resides over his wood shop with magical powers but is also…

Sure, your friends may have been laughing (and slightly scared) back in April when you embedded class II lasers in your checkbones and told them Matterport’s 3D scanning IS THE FUTURE, but now you’ll be the one prepared. News of the Mountain View based, Y Combinator startup raising $3.9 million from a whopping 39 Investors…

Mcor’s unique paper-based 3D print technology has been holding up strong at their select Staples locations in Europe. I had the opportunity to talk with Mcor’s CMO Deirdre MacCormack at SolidWorks World 2013 where she walked me through how their Iris 3D printer works (the one being used at Staples), as well as some updates…

A 3D printed Steampunk Earth is one way to bring fab-art inspiration to the masses, but nothing, and I mean nothing, is better than designing, printing and selling your own toys. Just ask Wayne Losey, creator of ModiBots, the snap-tastic, print-to-order robot toys you can mix and match for a custom creation of your own.

This Steampunk World could very well be a replica of the actual world sent back from the future. I’m guessing it’s exactly what the world will look like in… oh, let’s say 2840… give or take a few decades. It was created by Mauricio Chong (aka MacBurro) after discovering Shapeways and realizing that you can…

On par with the recent trend of 3D head scanning and printing, Shibuya’s FabCafe in Tokyo is offering a new service for those needing to get more personal than your typical box-of-chocolates-fare this Valentine’s Day by allowing new makers to scan their lovely mugs to be used as molds for chocolate delectables. Who knew my…

This post is part of our series on cool crowd-funded projects that are pushing forward technology in product development and introducing innovative product design. They’re all projects we’re contributing to as well. If you would like to participate and share your project or another you find interesting, submit it to kickit@www.solidsmack.com or let us know…

Remember way back in 2013, when everyone was going crazy about 3D printing, buying those boxy little printers to make custom dog tags, phone cases and trays for their belongings? Yeah, crazy times. It’s all changed now in 2015 with 3D printing moving outside the box and FabClay was one of the first showing what…

3D Printing has been lauded as the next way to bring jobs back to America and the rest of the West by the Economist and other intellectual luminaries like Glenn Beck (cough cough). CAD-to-Print technologies combined with geographic proximity to the buyer has been summed up as the solution to what some call “the China…

Remember sitting in the living room when you were little, an old record playing in the background, mom cooking meat pies and the smell of lead solder in the air as your father fried the circuits of your RC car under a shiny pile of metal? If you could, you would have turned the scene…

If the video that Sandboxr has put together is any indication of the smooth, fluid, character-building fab fun you’ll be having, February 1st can’t come soon enough. On that day, they’re launching an app that puts the mix on the circa-2008 Spore 3D Creature Creator and the web-based My Robot Nation 3D printed robot army…

3Dlt.com, a sort of stock photo-like site for 3D printing templates has created a marketplace for professional designers, students, companies, and consumers–however their mission is rooted in crowdsourcing solutions for solving some of the ‘world’s biggest problems’. Their current initiative? An Innovation Challenge using 3D Printing to improve gun safety with the finalists winning a…

EvD Media’s Adam O’Hern has been keeping our cadjunkie members busy with his latest SolidWorks tutorial series centered around developing a product from scratch with consideration to working within teams of engineers, graphic designers, and of course, industrial designers. What better way to start the first month of the new year than with some fresh…

The Replicator 2 has been screaming around the 3D printing industry’s racetrack as a go-to solution for both professionals and consumer hobbyists alike. MakerBot has capitalized on profiling the MakerBot users who are using their Replicator 2’s to do something outside of the box and have found success in doing so. Here’s an inspiring story…

It sits there…staring across the room, waiting for something, anything from you. As the dust gathers within the crevices of it’s numerical keypad, it silently weeps CMYK tears that splash off it’s matte ABS plastic cheeks. When you leave the office, it stares at your monitor with misty cartridges as it remembers a day when…

What if you could feel your profile. Like, touch that data, man! Well, yes you can. The Creator’s Project (a partnership betweeen Intel and Vice Magazine) have been working with Shapeways to offer you a way of combining your likes, your friends and your pictures to create models that can be printed off. Do you remember Geoids? Now you…

Having been open for a month, Keen Footwear’s Keen Garage in Portland, OR has seen nothing but glowing reviews from business leaders, architects, designers, environmentalists, and customers. Featuring everything from reclaimed barn doors to repurposed oil barrels upcycled into [comfy!] chairs, the retail environment is the penultimate museum of inspiration for repurposing…with purpose.

Advertised as ‘Miniature Mountain Majesties’ on their Shapeways site, TinyMtn probably couldn’t describe their product any better even if they were offered a contract with NASA to 3D print mars as the prize. By using USGS (United States Geological Survey) public data, the creators have produced a striking 3D print library that begs the question…why…

Barely coming off the heels of the OpenRov open-source underwater robot project he developed at TechShop, David Lang has since marketed himself as an ‘(unexpected maker) Maker’ to help ease those with weak knees into the Maker Movement. After losing his desk job, he decided that he would do something other than stare at the…