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A few more sugar sculptures

Sugar Soliton
This is a rendering of the sculpture Soliton by Bathsheba Grossman, as output by the CandyFab 4000; it's a three-dimensional form made out of pure sugar. Seeing Bathsheba's sculptures at the 2006 Maker Faire was the inspiration for us to build the machine in the first place, so it's quite exciting to be able to print this. (The design is used by her kind permission-- please buy some of her sculptures!)

This is our second try at fabbing this difficult shape. Our first attempt was at a somewhat smaller size and ran into trouble with the thin beams when *one* of our thin horizontal layers turned out to be too weakly bonded. To avoid a second failure, we enlarged the model but also ran the heater element very hot and for an extended period of time to make the pixels srong, but also larger, more rounded, and richer in color-- a darker caramel. In this view we're looking right down at the printed layers of sugar; we think that the grain of the layers makes this look a lot like a wood carving.


Of course, that's not all that we've been printing this week. Here is one more large-scale object that we made:

mobius monster

The shape is a 3/4 twist mobius strip with a square cross section and windows cut at regular intervals in all of the sides the side. Even though it's hollow, it still weighs seven pounds and fourteen ounces-- that's a lot of sugar. We're bringing this monster to Maker Faire this weekend, so you can see it for yourself, too.

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Here's what others have to say about 'A few more sugar sculptures':
Bathsheeba Grossman Back at Maker Faire from MAKE: Blog
Bathsheeba is back again at Maker Faire this year. I can't wait to see what she's got that's new. The Evil Mad Scientists got permission to make one of her sculptures out of sugar with their sugar rapid prototyper.... [read more]
Tracked on Thursday, May 17 2007 @ 02:30 PM PDT
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Another idea for a sculpture
From: Anonymous on Thursday, May 17 2007 @ 03:46 PM PDT
If you can get the 3-D data for it, you should try printing up a human skull. In Mexico, they make them by hand for the "Day of the Dead"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead
Prototyping Material
From: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 26 2007 @ 12:19 PM PDT
You should give a try to SORBITOL really. it is melting at 99 degree celcius. is a bit more expensive then regular sugar but has strong advantages (chemically stable when hot at a large temp. range, very regular corn size when bought, slow crystalisation (6h+) for fully solid and smooth shapes, nice white color and many more. You will find sorbitol at the sweetener shelve in big supermarkets. I am experimenting with materials and inexpensive heating methods and sorbitol is really a hot candidate. Another good thing is that if you are using the prototype as template for e.g. polyester/fiber or whatever plastic then you can easily dissolve the remaining sorbitol with warm water afterwards. If you heat sorbitol you will see that it is not getting hard right away but will be more like high viscous chewing gum, still able to contract it's surface. the full glass-like stiffness comes after a few hours only. One annoying thing is the very high surface tension similar to saccharose though. maybe someone will find a good additive to solve this :)
A few more sugar sculptures
From: Anonymous on Monday, July 02 2007 @ 08:08 PM PDT
Have you attempted to polish any models yet? Sandblast, sand, bake, gentle touch of the flamethrower, etc.

-David