A plane You Can Print

Posted on July 21, 2006  Comments (3)

A plane you can print by Paul Marks:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part – a wing strut, say – is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focused, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Polecat is a new unmanned plane: “About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.”

More information on 3d printing from a manufacturer of the printers. Not quite ready for in home printing of say a new can opener on demand but can that day really be far away?

3 Responses to “A plane You Can Print”

  1. Gordon
    July 30th, 2006 @ 8:56 pm

    This is an interesting blog you’ve got here; I just found it last week, when I was writing about Polecat on my blog AeroGo. I thought you folks might be interested.

    The first post was about the P-175 in general:
    http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/510321696/polecats-flying-cars-and-skunk-workx.html

    The second was about LockMart’s use of the rapid prototyping approach and its potential, both in general and for aerospace in particular:
    http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/511717517/the-downloadable-future-aircraft-kit.html

  2. CuriousCat: Jetson Jetplane
    December 5th, 2007 @ 3:48 pm

    Finally the Jetpacks we were promised by the Jetson’s ๐Ÿ™‚ Well not really but still pretty cool…

  3. Open Source 3-D Printing ร‚ยป Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog
    July 31st, 2013 @ 8:03 am

    Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of Cornell University have cooked-up a cheap DIY 3-D printer โ€“ the Fab@Home…

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