3D printing and fashion continue to converge much faster than most of us had expected. What seemed like merely a pipe dream by some fashion designers just a couple years ago has quickly become a means of creating all sorts of unique clothing, accessories, and footwear.

 
Currently an India-based company called Fracktal Works offers two machines, the Snowflake and Julia, both of which are high-quality printers. It’s not just about hardware creation for the company though, as their co-founder and COO, Asil Rohit, explained: “It all started a month back for the Fracktal Works team, to print figures and collectables for a display booth at 3Dprint UAE, held on the 17th and 18th of August. Luckily we had a spool of wood filament left behind which we used for testing and considered using it for printing figures.”

This is when the idea of the 3D Printed Functional WoodFill Wrist Watch was born. One of the designers for Fracktal Works, named Kewal Chand Swami, designed an intricately detailed watch using Solidworks. After several iterations he came up with a design that would make for the perfect print using colorFabb’s woodFill filament.

Using the company’s Julia v2 series 3D printer, Swami 3D printed his design in multiple pieces, including all 20 of the individual links, and the entire watch body except for the actual mechanical analog components. The printing process took just 2.5 hours, and as you can see in the pictures, the watch is quite the work of art. The files for the watch have been made available to anyone interested in 3D printing one themselves, on Thingiverse, and the size can be completely customized based on the number of links you decide to print out.

For the actual mechanics, Swami and team took apart an old analog watch and more or less just transplanted the components into their new creation. The watch works perfectly.

“We also have made functional prototypes of an electric screwdriver and a 3D printed mini drone,” said Rohit. “The designs of the same shall be open sourced for others to contribute, develop and reuse.”