3D Printing in Stone, or Copy a Sculpture in Rock

An anonymous reader writes "With all this design your own parts and electronics talk lately here on /., what about creating your own stone sculpture on a PC or Copying a Stone Sculpture? You can do that with an outfit called Studio Roc in CA. The New York Times has an interesting article on this marriage of CAD, laser scanning, and rocks. 'Using a huge Italian-made Omag Mill5 five-axis milling machine equipped with a scanner and 30 interchangeable diamond-tipped bits and blades, the Mill5 can record nearly any object in minutes and carve a duplicate in any stone in a few hours.'"

Comments

My Sculpture!

[toetagger1]

I wonder if that machine could make a life-sized sculputure of myself? Where shall I put it?

Pick it up at Staples....

[Himring]

what about creating your own stone sculpture? ...'Using a huge Italian-made Omag Mill5 five-axis milling machine

Sounds great! I'm supposing Staples will have the huge Italian-made Omag Mill5 five-axis milling machine....

Nice

[nycsubway]

Oh, this is nice, especially for restoring old buildings. If an artist can recreate a plaster mold, they can get a stone copy. That could save a lot of time in restoration.

This could also have potential in restoring wood carvings, assuming the machine can mill wood.

The SMAA will not like this

[denis-The-menace]

The Stone Masson Association of America will not stand for such a thing. They will soon lobby for a DMCA-like legislation to outlaw progress like this.

Because someone had to say it

[plover]

How much wood would a stone mill mill if a stone mill could mill wood?

Re:Question on the cutting

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know why they use a diamond tipped cutter instead of a laser cutter?

Probably because the frickin' sharks demanded better benefits.

Re:Question on the cutting

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser cutting (or abrasive waterjet) is usually for flat items like sheetmetal where you make the cut all the way through the material. If you need to make a partial cut, a mechanical device is your only choice.

Re:Question on the cutting

[RPI Geek]

There's a few reasons.

Conventional millers are cheaper.

Lasers can't get inside features like hollowed-out areas (they can't control depth as well because they don't know the exact material properties inside the stone, and if it hit an unexpected soft spot, oops! there goes the whole thing.

A laser cutter would use much more energy to burn the material away than a conventional mill uses to just chip it.

Hope this helps.

Free Sculpture Foundation

[Stiletto]

Friday, July 23, 4004
NEW YORK (AP) - A new organization has been created to promote the copying and redistribution of stone sculptures. Calling itself the Free Sculpture Foundation, or FSF, the group aims to "free" works of art which until now have been "hoarded" by stone copyrighters.

"How can you copyright a piece of rock?? It's the earth, man!" Hippie and founder Richard Stoneman said he got his idea from a recent Slashdot post, "3D Printing in Stone, or Copy a Sculpture in Rock". Great works such as those by Michelangelo will be among his first projects.

Industry groups are not impressed. Chiseled Sales, Inc. spokeswoman Hillary Rocken announced the formation of a trade group opposed to Mr. Stoneman's band of fredom fighters. The Rock Is Available Association, or RIAA is set to lobby government officials to crack down on these "rock robbers". "The talented sculpturers we represent are losing hard earned profits by these thieves. Stone may come from the earth, but that shouldn't stop us from selling it," Rocken said in a prepared statement.

The debate is not likely to go away any time soon. Shortly after the formation of the FSF, a new rival group was formed, calling itself the Open Stone movement. President Erock S Raymond called for a meeting of the minds between business and stone consumers, noting the benefits of opening up the hardware "blueprints" to great works of art.

This isn't 3D printing, sorry

[panurge]

You need a block of stone in the first place, from which you remove stuff. It's exactly the same as standard sculpture except that instead of apprentices, laborers and great big stone saws, they're using a milling machine to get a high quality rough. And (RTFA) this does produce a rough: hand finishing is required, just as special finishing is required with the output of most machine tools. The comments this is getting suggest to me that too many people nowadays don't have a clue about manufacturing - and we in the West will surely regret this one day.

Printing is a process that involves ADDING material to a substrate, not taking it away.

So yes, it's a nice application of one of those multi-axis machine tools the Italians do so well, but it's basically the same as any die-sinking process.

Of course it would be able to...

[cnelzie]

...you could also get that done at virtually most protoype machine shops across the US.

If they have laser scan capable CMMs (That's Coordinate Measuring Machines), just about any 5-Axis Vertical Milling Machine and some decent machine operators it can be done.

Heck, you could even have that milled out of high-quality Aircraft Aluminum, like a 7000-series. You could also go with tooling steel, like Cold Drawn 1018 Carbon Steel or S-7 Tooling Steel...

None of this is really new. The technology has been around for at least 10 years, from the laser scanning to the 5-Axis Mills.

Re:DIY

[Solder Fumes]

CNC can be had for much, much cheaper than $100,000. I built my own little CNC machine (bottom of page) from scratch for less than $250. That's not going to mill stone (very fast, anyway) but you can get a full-size Bridgeport or some Japanese mill for under $2,000 in some cases. For another $1,000 or less, and using the mill to build its own parts, you can retrofit the Bridgeport with servo or stepper drives, and use an obsolete desktop computer to control it using free software. Shops also turn over equipment like CNC machines pretty often, in order to keep up with everyone else. An expensive machine pays for itself many times over before it becomes obsolete. You may be able to find an older CNC mill, ready to run, for less than $5,000. I happen to know of one that, if I ever get the space, could be had for under $2,000. For all the information you need, try the CAD CAM EDM DRO Yahoo Group.

Other 3D printing firms...

[CoffeeDregs]

Clever.

Also check out:
http://www.precisionlaserart.com - uses lasers to make small fractures in glass;
http://www.prometal.com - uses metal powder to create arbitrary 3D forms;
http://bathsheba.com - artist who uses the above forms;

Note: I've used PrecisionLaserArt for some artwork and had a good experience, so I'm biased...