I always thought Ken Denmead was GeekDad, but it turns out it's more flexible than that, like Marina from Fresh Beat Band, or The Yellow Wiggle. Good to know.
Anyway, over at GeekDad, Roy Wood is doing Important Work, tracking down dad/industrial designer Duann Scott and actually getting into the 3-D printed nuts and bolts of that supposed $25 DIY Bugaboo Repair situation.
Which I called bullshit on at the time, which bullshit call seems to only be reinforced by the offhanded awesomeness of Scott's little project:
DS:...3D Modeling the part in CAD took me about 5 minutes, the hardest part was measuring the broken part as there is an angled straight off of a curved section so getting the right angle was kinda tricky but I did the old trick of laying my screen on its back, making the image 1:1 and putting the broken part on top to check. Perhaps not best practice in engineering firms but it worked.Yes, a still more glorious dawn awaits, where kids will be able to 3-D print parts for their own strollers as easily as they use an iPad. Probably in mid-2012. Then it'll just be getting the lawyers comfortable with the customer service folks telling you to fix your own damn stroller.It also led me to think that this part could easily have been scanned on a flatbed scanner, uploaded to Image Popper and 3D printed with no CAD skills... I tried it out, waiting on the prints but it looks quite acceptable.
...
GD: Do you have previous experience with CAD design?
DS: I have formal qualifications as an industrial designer so I am quite fluent in CAD programs but this level of 3D modeling, a basic extrusion of an outline could be made with a jpeg and image popper as mentioned or undertaken easily and quickly in SketchUp, 123D and Tinkercad, all of which are free 3D software capable of outputting files for 3D printing and are relatively easy to learn.
DIY Repair of a Baby Stroller... in 3D! [geekdad]
