Need a new bicycle light? Print it

Three-dimensional printers allow you to manufacture almost anything you want at home, including a host of cycling-related accessories.

The bicycle lamp attachment pictured right deflects some of the light so that it is visible from the side – a useful boost to visibility on dark winter mornings and nights. It was created using a 3-D printed and the plans for it are now available to download and adapt by other 3D printer users.

The machine used to print the torch attachment is reminiscent of the ‘replicator’, a device well known to fans of Star Trek which is capable of instantly creating almost anything from scratch. The Thing-O-Matic 3-D printer cannot yet produce circuit boards or food, but can build almost any object using layers of ABS – the same plastic used to manufacture Lego.

It is expected that 3-D home printers will soon be capable of producing every component required to manufacture an iphone, with the exception of the microchip.

3-D printers have, until now, cost many thousands of pounds. The Thing-O-Matic is better value because it is made from off-the-shelf components and supplied as a kit, which claim its designers, is as easy to assemble as a flat pack from IKEA.

The website Thingiverse already hosts over 5,000 designs for objects that can be downloaded for free.

Thing-O-Matic kit is available to buy in Britain at Robosavvy

Cycle insurance that’s copied, but rarely bettered

Cycle insurance from the ETA offers protection for both you and your bike. It includes new-for-old, third party insurance on any bike you ride , personal accident cover, race event cover and if you suffer a mechanical breakdown, we will come out and recover you and your bike.

3-D printing – “democratised manufacturing”

Bre Pettis, co-founder and chief executive of MakerBot, said; “As with the realised ambition of Bill Gates, who famously said he wanted to put a computer in every home in the world, all of us will eventually own a 3D printer. If we were engineers, this thing would cost 100 times as much. But our goal is to democratise manufacturing so anyone can have a machine that makes anything they need. We want to render consumerism useless – and that doesn’t work if the machine isn’t cheap.”