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

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.

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.