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DIY 3D printer utilizes hot air, sugar to craft random objects
Just when you thought a $5,000 3D printer wasn't such a bad deal after all, the zany gurus at the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have put Desktop Factory's iteration to shame. The CandyFab 4000 is a homegrown printer that utilized a bevy of miscellaneous spare parts around the lab as well as the same sort of CNC hot-air control mechanism that we previously saw in the text writing toaster contraption. Their selective hot air sintering and melting (SHASAM) method allows the printer to begin with a bed of granular media (sugar, in this case) in which a directed, low-velocity beam of hit air can be used to fuse together certain areas repeatedly, eventually working the remaining grains into a three-dimensional object. The creators claim that while their CandyFab machine only ran them $500 in addition to junk parts and manual labor, even starting from scratch shouldn't demand more than a grand or so, so be sure to click on through for a few snaps of the fascinating results and hit the read link for the full-blown skinny.[Via MetaFilter]
CNC hot-air gun used to draw faces, text on toast
Slicing up ole Xbox consoles or using immensely powerful lasers to heat your morning cup of joe are certainly entertaining ways to make industrial machinery a bit more fun, but the CNC Toast printer ups the ante by providing an over-the-top replacement for those plastic molds we used as youngsters. By hacking a CNC hot-air gun to respond to a "computer-dictated X-Y control system" and affixing it to the carriage of a printer, the evil scientists were able instruct the toasty (ahem) blaster to move around in a user-selected pattern in order to print images and text onto pieces of toast. Cleverly dubbed "digital toast imaging technology," the apparatus was able to affix a number of slightly awkward faces on slices of bread, and even imprint "Hello World" onto one piece in particular. Still, you can't get the full impression of how geektacular this truly is without seeing it in motion, so that's why you should click on through right about now and hit play, cool?[Via HackedGadgets]
