We shared the teaser last week, but now the new project is on! (In fact, apparently over 1/4 of the parts were grabbed up within the first 24hrs.) The last project, George Sourcington, was briefly installed in our offices after its NY debut at the 3D Print Show.
WeTheBuilders: Help Crowdprint a Massive Bust of Ben Franklin by Sept 1st:
The way it works is that people who own a 3d printer can log in and download one 4″ chunk of a sculpture, 3d print it, and mail it back to Baltimore where they’re all getting glued together. George was made earlier this year and has travelled allover the US to different shows and landmarks. Our next project which just launched today is Distributed Benjamin Franklin is our second super-sized crowdsourced 3D print. Earlier this year, a new site, WeTheBuilders.com was launched by me and a team of 5 other makers at the ArtBytes Hackathon in Baltimore. With the help of 70 makers and their personal 3d printers worldwide, all 110 pieces were 3D printed and mailed to Maryland where they were all glued together to create the one-meter-tall sculpture called George Crowdsourcington.
George has been traveling all over the country to over a dozen events. He debuted at the NY 3D Print Show, went to Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York, did a residency at the Adafruit office in Manhattan, traveled to South-by-Southwest, Direct Dimensions, The Baltimore Node Hackerspace, several mini-Maker Faires, 3D/DC, Public Knowledge’s HQ, ConFabulation Symposium and 3D Printed Art Gallery at Prince George’s Community College, the US Science and Engineering Festival in DC, and even visited the Capitol Building and the National Mall. Next month he’ll be at the Silver Spring Maker Faire and World Maker Faire in NY.The hope is that with your help we’ll be able to print all 198 pieces needed to bring Distributed Ben Franklin together in time for the Silver Spring and World Maker Faires.
The parts are available at www.wethebuilders.com and anyone with a 3d printer is free to get started! The project just launched on Monday, August 4th and we’re hoping to get all the parts shipped to Baltimore by September 1st, in time for us to do all the gluing. The model of Ben was sliced up into pieces using netfabb. Any piece which was totally inside the sculpture and a perfect cube was removed, since there’s no need to 3D print that.
We The Builders is a fun free project to be a part of. It’s great to use your 3D printed to create something awesome with other makers from all over the world. You can find all the details and get started over at WeTheBuilders.com.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!