Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight…
Don your favorite bathrobe, cream that coffee and get comfortable with this week’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. The Weekend Reader features a handful of the most interesting articles featured on the ‘Smack over the past week ranging from tips and tricks to inspirational designs, processes, and more. So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too. The New iPad and Chromebook Tablets for Educators Are Also Great Options for Pros If you’ve been on the fence about finally entering into digital tablet sketching (or notetaking) territory, both Google…
When working on a project for a client, designer Eric Strebel likes to help out his fellow man by dropping some of his own modelling tips and tricks along the way. He’s already showed us how to create casting boxes, approximately a hundred cast parts from scratch, and his personal process for low volume manufacturing. This time around, Strebel is working with something a little closer to home. Bondo is a material almost any car nut or wannabe repairman will be familiar with. Released as a brand of polyester body fillers under the 3M conglomerate, most folks use this sticky putty as a universal answer to their house or car’s…
From quick repairs to form exploration studies, few materials are as useful around the design engineer’s workshop as good old Bondo. Featuring a resin-based filler and a hardening solution, the hardener is blended together with the filler to create a chemical reaction which cures the creamy and spreadable product into a solid body. Originally created as a quick-fix putty for auto body repairs, the fast-curing, and easy-to-sand formula carries a tremendous range of semi-permanent applications. No wonder, then, that the two-part putty is used extensively by industrial designers and engineers to easily prototype concepts. Needless to say, a can of Bondo belongs in every workshop. https://youtu.be/DXv1EX3YQcg Bondo 261 Lightweight Filler…
If you thought 3D printing an entire jet engine was a ambitious task, you aren’t thinking big enough… at least as far as size is concerned. 3D printed houses have been attempted in various ways, but we’ve been keeping our eye on what non-profit organization New Story and for-profit construction firm ICON is doing. They recently unveiled the first permitted, 3D printed house in the U.S., deep in the heart of Texas–Austin, Texas, y’all. Using their custom, portable, gantry-style, proprietary cementitious spittin’ 3D printer (patent pending), the structure of the house was constructed at a size of ~800 square feet with a (25% speed) print time of ~48 hours, from…
Long considered an indispensable asset for anybody working in CAD, the 3D mouse is a quintessential tool that belongs on the desktop of any industrial designer or engineer. Within a 3D application such as SolidWorks, Rhino, Fusion 360, or Keyshot, the directional, zoom and rotate functions provide an intuitive extension of the users’ design intent. To put it quite simply, a 3D mouse helps get rid of those annoying repetitive keystrokes and allows the designer to come as close to possible to holding their digital 3D design in the physical world. As pioneers of the 3D mouse territory, 3Dconnexion has blazed a trail with their SpaceMouse collection. And when it…