James Bond Drives 3D Aston Martin
The James Bond movies are known for lots of glamour, guns, girls, cars, villains—and, of course, gadgets. So what’s one of the coolest tech things in the latest Bond movie Skyfall, the 23rd installment of the exploits of 007? If you guessed the car Daniel Craig drives, you’d be correct—but probably not for the reason you think.
In the movie that marks the Bond series' 50th anniversary, our favorite spy is back in the driver’s seat of the classic Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery, the original James Bond, drove in Goldfinger in 1964. But wasn’t that car sold at auction a couple of years ago? For $4.1M? Doesn’t matter.
Thanks to today’s 3D printing technology, 007 is once again behind the wheel of his beloved Aston Martin, albeit a replica.
According to 3ders.org, British company Propshop Modelmakers, which produced the film props, used innovative 3D printing technology from Augsburg-based voxeljet to create the three Aston Martin DB5 models that double for the now priceless original vehicle from the 1960s during the film's action scenes.
Says the voxeljet CEO, Dr. Ingo Ederer:
Propshop commissioned us to build three plastic models of the Aston Martin DB5. We could have easily printed the legendary sports car in one piece at a scale of 1:3 using our high-end VX4000 printer, which can build molds and models in dimensions of up to eight cubic meters. But the British model builders were pursuing a different approach. To ensure that the Aston Martin was as true to detail as possible, and for the purpose of integrating numerous functions into the film models, they decided on an assembly consisting of a total of 18 individual components. The entire body is based on a steel frame, almost identical to how vehicles were assembled in the past.
As producer Michael G. Wilson says, “We’ve used different cars from time to time, but we always do come back to Aston Martin.”
