This Is The Age of Miracles and Wonder

So we've had this big ol' kitchen wood-fired cookstove for the past ten or twelve years. It's one of those many large things we acquired when the Favorite Husband wound up going to a party without me. But I digress. My point is, we have this big ol' cast iron cookstove, and about a week into owning it a latch-hooky part (it holds the pivot bar of a door) came apart. Which is the tendency of cast iron; it is awfully brittle. It broke at the natural stress point, clean through the bolt hole.

I have many friends in the machine tools trade, and I could have begged one of them to design and cut me a new piece, but that was an imposition. I spent a few years puttering around blacksmith shops and whatnot, looking for a similar piece of iron I could use in its place, but no go.

And then the miracle of 3D printing came along! So I thought, for an experiment, I'd just model me up a new one in Blender (an open source 3D program) and ship it off to Shapeways. So that's what I (eventually; this IS Mojo we are talking about) did.

So what a great age we live in, huh? I draw something on the computer, I upload the file to a website, and two weeks later, I get THIS in the mail, to immediately compare to the original:

The new one is in stainless steel, so I'll have to stoveblack it. Other than that, I am quite pleased with my hour's work or so modeling the silly thing. I declare this experiment with The Future to be an Unbridled Success.

Oh, and it makes a good cat toy, too, as Fred quickly discovered. Albeit an EXPENSIVE ONE. Thank you, kitty.

So let it never be said Mojo won't try something new. Speaking of trying something new, the same day I received my stove part from Shapeways I also received THIS bunch of stuff. But that's another story entirely. And it has nothing to do with peeeeeple.

Just call me "Pathetic Trendmonger". Or, just insatiably curious...

Mojo