RAPID

3D Printed Salt & Pepper Shakers are Customized Based On a Couple’s Personal Information

Eplus 3D

Share this Article

If you haven’t ever looked at collectible salt and pepper shakers, you should take a moment of your time to peruse the dramatic variety. You might not have realized that salt and pepper shakers had such a diversity of forms or such a loyal fan base. Some collect them because they are cute while for others it is a serious hobby involving surprisingly large sums of money. One such collection was created over the course of a couple of decades by Andrea Ludden, a Belgian archeologist now living in the United States.Salt-and-Pepper-Museum-dachunds-17.jpg__600x0_q85_upscale

It began when she bought a pepper grinder at a yard sale but then found it didn’t work. She put it in a window ledge and bought another. Then, she found one that promised to be even better and so she added the second grinder to her window shelf. Slowly, but surely, she began to notice salt and pepper shakers in more and more places and in a delightful variety of forms. Over the next several decades, her collection grew to include 80,000 shakers. This collection now resides at their Museum of Salt and Pepper Shakers in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

The collection ranges from beautifully wrought works in silver to kitschy hugging kittens and everywhere in between. Ludden notes that there are even a whole series of sexually explicit salt shakers, but quickly qualifies that because of the family oriented nature of her museum, they don’t put those on display.

Salt shakers came into existence in the 1920s; prior to this time, salt had been served in a small container with a lid called a salt cellar. The Morton Salt Company discovered that by adding magnesium carbonate to the salt it would prevent caking and could be shaken out of a container through small holes. In fact, there’s a entire history to salt that is well worth exploring and is 625x465_2915074_7783957_1417548924covered in great, and entertaining, detail in a book called, appropriately, Salt by Mark Kurlansky.

There’s a new type of salt and pepper shaker that Ms. Ludden might want to consider adding to her already vast collection and it is as cutting edge now as non-caking salt was in the 1920s: 3D printed salt and pepper shakers. A particularly interesting set has been designed by Pseudorama, a design studio based in Colombia and are created using an algorithm that integrates the personal stories of couples into their form.

As each form is created based on personal data from a couple, each set of salt and pepper shakers is different, creating a mind boggling design, and then 3D printed via Shapeways. In order to have your own personalized set representing you and your partner, some information that the designers at Pseudorama need from you are things such as height, weight, hair, and eye color. Once the information is entered into the program, a form is generated unique to that particular couple. That form can be printed through Shapeways in any of their plastics.

I guess this could also be a way of turning a life that is unlucky in love into a burgeoning collection of salt and pepper shakers; each one a tragic memory. However, it’s probably better to hope for just one set – and that it’s perfect.

Let’s hear your thoughts on these designs.  Have you purchased them?  Discuss in the 3D Printed Salt & Pepper Shaker forum thread on 3DPB.com.

sa

Share this Article


Recent News

3D Printing Firm Divergent Appoints Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Board

3D Printing News Unpeeled: Metal 3D Printing Pen, Shell Wall 3D Printing



Categories

3D Design

3D Printed Art

3D Printed Food

3D Printed Guns


You May Also Like

Featured

Medical Goes Additive: How Social Networks Are Humanizing the 3D Printing Industry

It seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, but the activities of machines can only ever be, at most, half of what defines a technology. The remainder...

3D Printing Webinar & Event Roundup: March 26, 2023

Get ready for a busy week that’s chock full of webinars and events, both virtual and in-person, all around the world. Let’s not waste time, read on for all the...

2023 AMUG Conference Showcases Maturity of 3D Printing Industry

In reading our series on the early days of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG), attendees of the 2023 AMUG Conference may be blown away by the sheer growth of...

3D Printing News Unpeeled: Failure to Ignite, Synchrotrons and Connectors

Relativity Space‘s rocket did launch after two failed attempts but the second stage failed to ignite. This is a terrible event in 3D printing. It makes us all look bad and...