NYC MakerFaire: A Really, Really Big Printer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtQG733dC1s

Walk in to the science center at Maker Faire this year, and the first thing you’ll see is a gargantuan assemblage of aluminum extrusion spitting out molten plastic for one of the biggest 3D prints you’ve ever seen. It’s SeeMeCNC’s PartDaddy, a 16-foot tall 3D printer with a four foot diameter build plate.

The printer doesn’t extrude filament. Instead, this printer sucks up PLA pellets and extrudes them with a modified injection mold press mounted to a delta printer frame. That’s a 4mm nozzle squirting plastic. The heater for the extruder is 110 V, and the NEMA32 motors are controlled with 72V drivers. Everything about this is huge, and it’s surprisingly fast; a single-wall vase grew by about two feet in as many hours. We have no idea how fast a solid print can be completed, although the SeeMeCNC guys will probably find out later this weekend.

SeeMeCNC also had a neat little resin printer with an impossibly clever name on display. We’ll get a post up on that later this weekend.

28 thoughts on “NYC MakerFaire: A Really, Really Big Printer

  1. This thing really is huge! It is amazing to see that it works so precisely with such long arms… Seeing it i had the impression that it would wobble/vibrate…
    Considering the print it seems not to be the case…

  2. Extruding PLA was ambitious, it’s nowhere as easy to extrude from pellets as ABS, at least from my experience. Probably much better though given unvented, non-enclosed indoor operation.

    1. Dreaming a bit here. John mentions “mill” and “foam” in the same sentence a bit up. Maybe something like this can mill foam (layer by layer) for a full scale cast of a person.

      The inside of the shell would have to be filled up with sand for the casting though.

  3. Saw this, the printer is really cool. But was disappointed that all they were doing is printing giant vases. It can print 9′ objects! Where’s the life-size mech battle suits, orcs, etc etc??

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