I owe Steve a huge thank you…

Steve and his mate Simon decided to dabble in some 3D printing a while back when they had some time to kill – and at the time they couldn’t quite find a 3D printer that suited them, so they designed one and then promptly started producing them for sale. (Yip, Bright boys!)

Ever since then I feel like whenever I’ve bumped into Steve at either an MPP, a BBQ or at Peter’s place, he’s always just produced something new and he’s passing them around for folks to play with. Sometimes he’d let us give him a couple of quid for a copy, but often he just insists that you take a copy and refuses all offers of cash.

Some of them have been classic Stewart Coffin designs – latterly particularly ones that haven’t been produced much because they’re a pig to make accurately out of wood (no trouble if you’re 3D printing them!) and some have been prototypes of Steve’s own designs. (I love my psychedelic Peanut!)

A little while back Steve and I were talking about lithophanes that James Dalgety had introduced me to a year or three back. Lithophanes are wondrous etched or moulded works of art on semi-translucent surfaces (think thin porcelain) which display a picture when light shines through them… so you’re basically getting a grey-scale picture where the depth of the grey is determined by the depth of the material at any particular point. 

Look at them in ambient light and they’re not very interesting, but put a light source behind them and a picture emerges. Anyway, Steve had mentioned that he was fiddling around with them on his Threedy printers and the very next time I saw him he handed over a freshly printed lithophane of my ugly mug in full manic IPP Exchange mode – it’s taped to the window in my puzzle cave to intimidate everyone who comes in to play with the toys… not sure it’s working (the intimidating bit!), but it is a great little talking piece. 

Thanks Steve!