Poor Man's Iron Man

A little art project made from a photo enlarger lens, broken camera parts and LED ribbon.  It will power something small for never and something big for never-ever.

Focus Chart System

I have been the Camera & Equipment Repair Technician for NYU's Film & TV program for almost 10 years and have finished a few custom projects.  I test a lot of cameras and have limited space to work with, so I designed and built this movable focus system.  It's all cobbled together from stuff I ordered from McMaster-Carr.

Movable focus chart system which I designed and built.  I used structural aluminum for the frame and sled and suspended industrial track from the ceiling.

Evil Dead Chainsaw

I haven't done Halloween for a long time, but my workstudy students convinced/inspired me to put something together this year.  Unfortunately the costume never got used due to Hurricane Sandy and our mandatory evacuation.  Maybe next year...

Flashfoward two years and I finally got to use it:

Find instructions to build your own on Instructables. 

The side vent, and pull-cord assembly are 3D printed, you can download the files here.


I carry printed grills and MDF blades on my Etsy store.

FINISHED! - All the Beauty Pix

It all went together really well. Overall I'm very pleased.

I built a custom stand with a ball-joint to allow for lots of poses.

Hit the jump for lots of pictures...

Assembling the Octopod

The moment of truth. Will everything go together?  I did a lot of test prints for the tentacles but no big tests for the body.  I did small parts to try out methods and see what I could get away with, but for the most part this was the one and only print for the body.

Cockpit fits!

Read on to see how it went....

File Prep

One of the many differences with modeling for 3D printing is the file prep which must be done.  The model has to be exported as an STL file (Standard Tessellation Language) which is meant for printing and CNC work and describes the surface geometry of the model.  The STL file must also be checked in mesh repair programs which will look for holes in the mesh, duplicate vertices, non-manifold edges (edge which touches more than two faces), inverted normals (flipped geometry faces) and more.  Sometimes additional work will have to be done on a part before it will run through correctly.

I printed in different materials so I had the additional step of dividing out all the parts to their separate materials.  This gets tricky when one part uses multiple materials because each material has to be exported separately and then reassembled in the printing program where the materials are assigned.  Here's a walk through:

Here's half of the body. Notice all the different colors.

Oh Noes! - When the Model Gets Goofed-Up

I was in the process of getting the Octopod ready for printing when I noticed this:

I'm looking along the length of the body where the two halves meet up and noticed that they didn't match.  Somewhere along the way the right half got bumped up by .01mm.  The cockpit lid also got bumped both forward and to the side.  Since all the parts go together with screws and all the holes must line up this could have been a total disaster.  I had to backtrack through 6 different versions of the project to find where the problem started so I could assess what I had to fix.  It sidetracked me for a few hours but I did get it fixed.

Remember to save often and of equal importance is to document what you have done to each file and how they differ.  I have a simple text document in the project directory for this purpose.