Custom 3D Printers
Custom 3D printers built since 2010, and the custom prototypes that were always the real point.
The machines were never the point. What they could make was.
I have been building my own 3D printers since 2010, but I do not build them for the printers. I build them because I love designing and making custom prototypes, and in 2010 there was almost nothing off the shelf that could make them for me. So I built the tools that could.
Building the tools
I started with the open-source RepRap project, the early self-replicating printer movement, back when that was most of what existed and the mechanics were mine to learn from the ground up. From there I went fully custom: printers of my own design. Later I took Ultimakers and reworked them, fitting custom components like linear actuators to get the motion I actually wanted.
The printers got better because I needed them to. Each one was a means to an end, and the end was always the next prototype.
What I made with them
The range is the fun part. Custom parts for friends and a long run of my own prototypes:
- Braille tabs for a friend, a tactile accessibility aid printed to be read by touch.
- Lost-PLA aluminum casting. Investment casting with a twist: print a pattern in PLA, burn it out of the mold, pour in molten aluminum. A plastic print comes out as a real metal part.
- An insecticide atomizer for a backpack blower, built around the Venturi siphon principle. Fast air through a constriction drops the pressure and pulls liquid up into the stream to atomize it.
None of this was a product and none of it was for sale. It is personal and hobby work, prototypes for me and for the people around me. It is also the hands-on fabrication foundation under everything I have done since, and a big part of why Rough Draft Prototyping and Nurbly exist at all.