Shaun Garrity looks back to early R/C helicopters. This time in Retro Ramblings we have something a little different - retro helicopters. It’s hard to believe it was the early 1970s when I first came across them (I suddenly feel really old). R/C helicopters were actually flying prior to this but they were mostly constructed by pioneering modellers having to figure things out for themselves, because as far as I know no commercial products were available.
3Dprinting may seem like a fairly recent innovation, however it’s been around for longer than you might perhaps imagine. The first 3D printers appeared commercially in the mid 1990s, but priced in the region of £75,000 they certainly weren’t cheap - you were in Ferrari and Porsche territory.
The technology was developed in the 1980s, Chuck Hull being accredited with demonstrating his SLA-1 printer as the first commercial example some 34 years ago on March 9th. His intention was to develop a machine that would be capable of speeding up the time it took to create prototypes as using a one-off machining process was expensive
in terms of both time and money;the ability to print an item in just a few hours represented a major breakthrough as you can imagine.
