To get you through the middle-of-the-week doldrums, we bring you a small mix of cool, fun and important stuff from around the web. Happy Hump Day!
Boat Made from 3-D Printing Sets Sail
On July 14, Denny’s hosted its annual Seafair Milk Carton Derby, challenging groups to build a seaworthy craft out of milk cartons and set sail on Green Lake, outside Seattle. University of Washington group WOOF printed their boat. That’s right — they printed it.
The WOOF team of engineers and designers created their vessel in SolidWorks and used 3-D printing to make the boat, after getting down and dirty collecting milk jugs in area Dumpsters. They blogged about their entire experience, and you can read it at Fabbers @ UW.
Their boat was pretty impressive, placing second in its heat. The WOOF team “hacked a 4′ x 8′ plasma cutter, slapped a homemade extruder on and dealt with 2 percent shrinkage” to produce the craft. The boat, made of 250 one-gallon milk jugs, weighed 40 pounds and supported 150 pounds, yet cut through the water like a canoe.
MMS Releases Digital Issue
We recently told you about Modern Machine Shop’s Top Shops benchmarking issue with regards to the MTConnect standard. MMS has now released the issue as a special digital edition, which features all of the information on their Top Shops polls as well as exclusive videos. Check it out.
LEGO Milling Machine Is No Child’s Play
Turns out I shouldn’t have spent my childhood using LEGO to make castles and spaceships — I could have started a business instead.
Arthur Sacek of ZOOM Education for Life used LEGO to build a custom 3-D milling machine. Check out the video below, where the machine mills a piece of foam into… well, we won’t spoil the big reveal.
You can watch some other neat LEGO machine tools in action on Maker Masters.
