Finally, a practical use of a 3-D printer: Making your house a trove of ancient artifacts, just like a museum! Not actual ancient artifacts of course, but you know, close enough! Your uncultured lowbrow friends won’t know the difference, so let’s start impressing!

3-D printers are relatively new to the consumer space, the name most well-known in the field being MakerBot, however I have seem them on display in Best Buy and the Microsoft Store, running around $1300. The picture below is one I took of a 3-D printer at Best Buy in late November, but they are boxy looking things into which you feed a thread of plastic, then feed in a design, and it will ‘sculpt’ the design right in front of your eyes!

3-D printer on display at Best Buy

I learned through an article on Cnet that a company called Threeding sells 3-D printer designs that you can download, and they have teamed up with Varna Museum of Archaeology and The Regional History of Pernik Museum, both in Bulgaria, to let you download designs of actual ancient artifacts that are part of their collections (Varna collection, Pernik collection).

According to the Cnet article, the museums receive a %10-30% royalty for each design sold, as well as rights to all the scans for further research. And if you print them, while they won’t be the original artifacts themselves, they’ll just be made out of the plastic that you feed into the printer, but by simply looking at the piece it would be hard to tell. After all, all sorts of things can be printed these days: Houses, cars, food, Tom Hanks, so why not ancient artifacts? Here’s a page at PCMag.com that shows some really great 3-D printed items, including a guitar and chess set, but this page at creativebloq.com outdoes it handily. Who doesn’t need a 3-D printed Yoda?

A selection of the Varnik pieces

The Threeding site offers up many designs for sale, not just of archaeological interest but toys and housewares, although some of the categories are severely limited, like the ‘Bedroom’ section which only has two items, and the ‘Cinema’ section in the ‘Electronics’ category has no designs at all.

Still, I suspect this will be something we see more and more of as time goes on. This type of printing/manufacturing has really taken off, and some of the designs are incredible. As prices come down and designs increase, I suspect it will become commonplace, or at least even more so.