The different brands of toys just don’t go together. Unless you can just stack them and let gravity hold things together there really isn’t a good way to combine different sets. Sure, there are some building block brands that are ‘compatible’ with Lego, but really, that’s just more Lego. It isn’t the same. What if you could really connect Lego to K’Nex, or K’Nex to Tinkertoy, and make functioning structures. That could really open up possibilities.

And that’s where 3D Printing comes in. F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab have created the The Free Universal Construction Kit, which provides connector pieces to bridge ten popular construction toys with each other. The toys covered are Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears!Gears!Gears!, K’nex, Krinkles (aka Bristle Blocks), Lego, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoy, ZomeTool, and Zoob. Well, technically it is currently eight. Zoob and ZomeTool are still covered under patents and the adapters for those won’t actually be released until December 2016 and November 2022, respectively.

So you can go out and buy these now, right? Well, no – for two reasons. First, you can’t buy them because they are free. Second, you can’t buy them because they aren’t physical objects – until you make them so. They’ve been released as STL files through Thingiverse.com. You provide the 3D printer, like a Makerbot, download the files and print the part(s) you need. Check out the parts in action in this video:

I think this is exciting because it shows the potential for 3D printing. Today 3D printing is still a fringe thing, far from the mainstream, but at one time so were printers in general. Printing has evolved from fuzzy dot matrix printers to photo quality ink jets that are so cheap they’re basically disposable. The next jump is 3D printing. There are already a couple of commercial 3D printers on the market and they’ll only continue to improve. Just as we can download books, music, movies, and games today, in the near future we’ll be downloading ‘things’ the same way.

Small items to start, certainly, but we’ll have larger printers before too long. Need some extra chairs for the cook out? Print them. Plates & cups too. Then when it is done toss them into the chipper to be converted back into feedstock. Now that’s recycling. Want a truly custom case for your phone? Modify a design and print one. 3D printers continue to evolve and we’ll have multiple materials, colors, etc., to choose from.

You can even ‘print’ metal using powered metals and a temporary binder, then fusing the part in a sintering oven. Or directly building up a part in powdered metal by using a laser to solidify it layer my layer. A lot of complex metal parts are made this way today using presses and dies to shape the part then sintering to make it solid. (I had a factory temp job in college working in such a place. One of the dirtiest jobs I’ve had, but really interesting seeing how it was done.)

Maybe it seems far out, but much of what we have today seemed pretty far out just a decade or two ago. And maybe thinking about the toys has my imagination going. For now – go print out some toys and have fun.

Via The Verge.

Get a few and dogfight around the dorm or office.

Slower, but more heavily armored than the Iron Man armor, Stealth Operations Suit the [sic] boasts a much broader array of weapons, from repulsor rays to rocket launchers. Jim Rhodes pilots it on missions too sensitive for the high profile Iron Man to tackle.

Yep, that’s War Machine, pretty much. Apparently they don’t mean “stealth operations” so much as “deniable operations”, though one questions how deniable it is when it’s carried out by a guy who looks just like Iron Man except for his color scheme and some additional weapons. It’s been pointed out to me by a friend that, like chain-exclusive figures since the dawn of the practice (about, what, 10-15 years ago now), it’s mainly just a repaint of a toy designed for the regular mass market – in this case the standard Iron Man Mk III figure (depicting the “finished” suit that appears on most of the movie’s promotional materials).

Still, it’s surprising what a difference a color scheme makes. The movie suit’s helmet looks kind of War Machiney anyway, mostly in the way the “mouth” part of the mask comes together (though I wish they’d bothered to at least remold the figure’s head slightly to include the laser designator), and when it’s rendered in black and silver instead of red and gold, it looks considerably different. The overall effect is kind of “What if War Machine had been designed by Adi Granov?” – which is pretty much what they were going for. (Mind you, Adi Granov was probably all of ten years old when the War Machine suit first appeared.)

A few years ago, the trend in action figures was to mold them in dynamic action poses that pretty much rendered them unposeable. They still had articulation, but they were molded in such a way that if you moved them into any position other than the one they were packed in, they just looked ridiculous. Fortunately, that trend has partially abated now. This figure does suffer from it to a small extent – the legs are designed to suit the pose it’s packaged in and look a little odd in other positions – but nowhere near as bad as some earlier figures (early McFarlane Toys figures, for instance). It’s about the same height as, but oddly, much sleeker than, the earlier Marvel Legends War Machine figure, making it seem like it’s in an entirely different scale bracket when the height indicates otherwise.

And, as I had hoped, the articulation in this smaller figure is considerably improved over the larger Repulsor Power Iron Man (previously reviewed). This guy has ball and pivot hip and shoulder joints, double-hinge knees and elbows, a small amount of wrist and ankle articulation, and a working neck, plus a strangely positioned torso rotator (it’s not at his waist, but rather about halfway up his chest). Some of his joints are a bit hard to work because of interactions with other joints – it’s difficult, for instance, to make his upper legs rotate without twisting his hip joints, which can foul up the way they swing outward – but that’s always the price you pay for having more joints on an action figure in the first place.

Of course, War Machine wouldn’t be War Machine, even by another name, without his trusty shoulder-mounted missile rack and Gatling-style minigun, and the mold on this guy has been altered from the standard Mk III with the addition of a couple of sliding mounts for these two accessories, so that they can be moved to their stowed position on his back. This is a major improvement from the way these weapons were handled on the Marvel Legends figure, where the missile box was a) too small and b) attached in such a way that it flipped up, not back, and the minigun wasn’t on a flexible mount at all, just pegged onto his shoulder. On this figure, it’s pretty easy to pop them off of their mounts when trying to slide them, but they go right back on. They each have a spring gimmick that fires the “fake muzzle blast”-style missiles that are de rigueur these days; that particular design trend doesn’t impress me much, but since they’re missiles, they can be removed for display easily enough (so that he doesn’t look like he’s freeze-framed in the middle of shooting).

The downside is that the, where the shoulder weapons are handled wrong on the older figure and right on the new one, the exact opposite is true of the distinctive War Machine wrist cannons. On the older figure they’re molded right to his forearms. On this one, they’re a pair of bulky, ill-fitting snap-on bits. Also, his shoulder caps aren’t attached – they’re just kind of sitting there, held on by friction – so it’s very easy to knock them right off while trying to get the wrist bits attached.

Still, for what it is – a hastily-arranged repaint of an existing figure to use as a chain exclusive – Stealth Operations Suit does a pretty good job. The mounts for the shoulder weapons are very nicely done, and it looks different enough (and enough like the character it’s supposed to represent) that the effort isn’t a completely hollow one. (This is in sharp contrast to the “Repulsor Red Prototype” Target exclusive, which, as far as I can tell, is just the Mk III with the gold bits painted silver instead. Despite what the color scheme suggests, it’s not even a faint attempt at emulating the “Silver Centurion” suit, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Of all the currently announced movie toys I haven’t seen yet, the one I’m looking forward to most is the Iron Man Mk I figure, if only because the Stan Winston guys did a tremendous job on that prop and I’m eager to see how good a job the Hasbro designers did at replicating it in action figure form.

Twice.

So you might expect that I’d either be looking forward to the movie with a barely contained passion… or dreading it utterly. After all, there have been some damn fine superhero movies, and, uh, some not-so-fine ones.

Well, the trailers for Iron Man look pretty damn good – and don’t have anything to do with the brain-damaged bull they’re shoveling over in the comics these days – so I’m excited. And even if it wasn’t any good, it might produce some cool toys. Most of the first round of movie toys hasn’t reached this part of the universe yet, which isn’t all that surprising, but the area’s Wally Worlds do have at least one of the early ones in.

Repulsor Power Iron Man is a sizeable toy – he stands 12 inches high – but his articulation level is a bit disappointing, especially for a figure this size. Except for his neck, he has only simple swivel joints at shoulders and hips and basic hinges at elbows and knees. That’s it. He doesn’t even have a waist joint (presumably because his torso is stuffed full of a speaker and the control module for the speech feature), and both of his arms have to be rigid from the elbows down to accommodate the gimmicks built into his hands (the left one has a light-up repulsor in the palm, the right fires a plastic missile that’s supposed to be molded to look like a repulsor blast), but why the rest of him is so immobile, I don’t know; maybe just to keep the price down after the cost of the electronics.

Apart from the light-up palm, RP Iron Man has three main electronic gimmicks:

• Pushbutton-activated speech. His unibeam (that round bit on his chest, for you uninitiated types) is actually a button. Pressing it causes the button to light up yellow and the toy to say one of four things: “I am Iron Man!” (predictably, though at least he isn’t doing an Ozzy impression), “Repulsor blasts!” (followed by a repulsor sound effect – this one also makes his left palm light up), “Target engaged!” and “Auxiliary power!”
• Arm movement thingy. Basically, if you wave his left arm around, it makes the palm light up and elicits either one repulsor blast, a series of them, or the “Repulsor blasts!” (pew pew) sound option from the chest button. I assume because of the wire connecting the motion sensor and the light to the core of the electronic gadgetry in the chest, his shoulder only rotates through 180°.
• Boot jet sound effects. This one doesn’t work the way it says on the package, at least on the one I have. The package says if you tilt the heel of his right boot up, it plays a “boot jets start up” noise, followed by looped “flight” sounds that are interrupted by “swooping” noises if you move the toy around in the air, and you turn them off by tilting the same bootheel down, which plays a “shutdown” noise. On mine, the heel only tilts up, so it’s up for on, then up again for off. It’s quite easy to set this off by mistake, so it’s a good thing there’s a switch on his back that turns the electronics off. (It has a third setting, the one the toy is packaged in, which disables the boot and arm triggers and restricts the chest button to two of the four sounds.)

On the plus side, it’s a nice sculpt. It looks a lot like the Adi Granov/”Mark III” design featured in the bits of the movie trailer that come from (at a guess) the last half or so of the film, so if you like that design, you’re golden, and the large scale allows for a lot of detail. The only real downside is that his very restricted articulation means there’s really no good display position for his arms – since they’re molded permanently in a “repulsors firing” pose, putting them at his sides looks weird and the only other really viable pose makes him look like he’s surrendering. (Well, and if you had an appropriately sized globe and some Fun-Tac, you could turn him into a statue of Atlas, I suppose.)

All in all, a little disappointing, if only because over the last few years I’ve been spoiled by the dramatic advances in action figure articulation technology. This guy’s only a little more poseable than the original 3-1/2″ Star Wars figures. In a 12″ figure, these days, you tend to expect a bit more. On the other hand, I’ve seen catalog entries for (but no pictures of, yet) other 12″ toys from this series, so maybe those, lacking electronics to accommodate, will do a little better on the “action” front. Also, the smaller figures in the line look promising on paper, though I haven’t seen them in person yet.