We’re taking another look at maker material store Inventables, which we wrote about a year ago. At the Inventables hardware store, you won’t find very much that you could put through your 3D printer. Plastic filament is best purchased elsewhere. However, sheer amount of truly amazing materials available at Inventables is staggering. While we can print interesting objects with our 3D printers, they are often much more interesting when put together in some unusual manner. Take for example, the classic bottle opener, which uses a coin as the “hard part”. It’s a combination of two materials that makes the coin opener work.
Back to Inventables: this site, the “innovator’s hardware store” has a great many items that could be combined with 3D printed parts to make unimaginable things. Take a look at these few materials we casually found on Inventables that might be part of things interesting:
- Temperature sensitive color-change fabric
- Squishy Gel Magnet
- Nanomuscle (A tiny actuator for linear motion)
- Glow-in-the-Dark Thread
- Powerless Illuminating Tubing
- Permanent Switchable Magnet
- LED Light Diffusing Plastic Compounds
- Color Changing Translucent Panels
- Surface-Mount Silicon Microphone
- Fiber Optic Backlight
- Clear Insulating Coating
- Bend Sensor
- Cost-Efficient 3.5 x 3.5mm Half Watt SMD LEDs
- Super Absorbent Fibers
- Durable Metallic Leather
- Damping Rubber
- Bronze Metallic Paint Finish
- High Definition Lenticular Lens
- Cuttable LED Strips for Lamination
And so on. What do you think you make with your 3D printer and those items? The list of products is quite startling and covers the categories of: Coatings, Electrical, Fasteners, Ingredients, Properties and Raw Materials.
Head over to Inventables and invent something to produce on your 3D printer today!
Via Inventables (Hat tip to Eric Hunting)
