Building 3D printed tanks by hand ..

Michael Sng is a one-man tank factory. The Singapore-based designer hand-built the walking mecha toy Codename: Colossus from 435 3D-printed parts. A former graphic designer, Sng previously sold Stikfas, a stick-figure toy he co-created, to Hasbro. Colossus started out as a way to learn new skills. "I didn't know a lot of electronics," Sng, 38, says. "I learned from scratch."He designed the toy as a 3D CAD file, printing each part on a small UP Plus 2 printer. "It's 60cm tall, but none of the parts is larger than 12cm long," he explains. "They're put together with hundreds of screws." Sng also hand-wired the working legs, guns and lights, and hand-painted each part, including the interior and tiny characters. (The tank's shell conceals a cannon that fires table tennis balls.) The process took 18 months and cost Sng more than $3,000 (£2,070). Colossus was part passion project, part audition: under the Machination Studios moniker, Sng's conceived a fictional universe for the toys, set after the first world war "where air power never happened, and tanks just got bigger and bigger." read more @wired.co.uk