The Egg-Bot Gets A Little Wax Stabby

eggbot

With Easter just around the corner, [Windell and Lenore] over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have come out with a new upgrade for their Egg-Bot. It’s called the Electro-Kistka and it allows your Egg-Bot to do wax-resist egg dying — in the same style as Ukranian Pysanky.

This isn’t the first time someone’s strapped a kistka to an Egg-Bot, but after seeing how much fun their customers were having, [Windell and Lenore] decided to make their own. It consists of two main components, a heater assembly that attaches to the Egg-Bot’s arm, and a power control board. To apply the wax they are using a kistka tip (looks like a soldering iron tip with a hole through it) which feeds molten wax onto the egg through capillary action.

It works almost exactly the same as the regular Egg-Bot arm, but allows you to dye your eggs with a very stark contrast as the wax repels dye perfectly. Just take a look at the following intricate designs.

multi
An example of a 4-step multi-color egg using this method

Still — using the EggBot kinda seems like cheating. Of course it would be fun to make a whole bunch of super intricate eggs, take them to the extended family get-together on Easter, and convince everyone you’re a master egg decorator.

13 thoughts on “The Egg-Bot Gets A Little Wax Stabby

    1. Well…now I have it. :P
      I’m curious as to how much of those image search results are legit, and how many are just fake. The disease-looking ones I think are more likely to be real, since you could have a crater-shaped piece of skin from a ruptured cyst, or skin which is inflamed in a circle. The body-jewelry (in large clusters)…if that’s real, it takes a lot of work to put in, and a lot of work to keep in. Like, normal piercings always have a tendency to be slowly ejected from the body, especially if the piercing isn’t through thick enough skin. Those pics show something that is essentially waiting to pop out, since it’s not even in an earring-like shape, to keep it attached *through* the skin. i.e. It’s just sitting on the surface.

  1. They say they have problems lining up multi-coloured eggs, since I assume they blow out the contents of the shell before they start why not just make 2 holes in one end and use those to match up to two pins for registration?

      1. Traditionally, you don’t empty the eggs *or* boil them, before you start your work. Boiling them makes the dyes not stick, and an egg with a hole in it is too weak to easily work on. What you do is make the egg, then either leave it to dry out/rot internally, or puncture a hole after you’ve finished the visuals. It’s very possible to screw up and break your whole egg that just took you two hours to finish, so a lot of people just leave the guts inside. (Hint: don’t ever break some old eggs from grandma. ;)

          1. -2 points for not listening. “Boiling them makes the dyes not stick”. Your statement continues to be true, though the application of it would render the eggs useless.

            Also, it’s gross to inherit a hard boiled egg from your babcia.

    1. Not just you. I have a kodak easyshare photo printer here that I have had my eye on hacking to turn into a resist printer (it uses thermal transferred wax films to print.) Also seems like a way to make silkscreen and soldermasks as well.

      The question of course is whether the wax will hold up to the etchant, how good it seals, and whether the heat would actually even transfer locally to a copper board (I have a feeling that the last question is what will kill the idea.

      Something like this would eliminate that problem by heating the wax separately. Preheating the board would help facilitate transfer of the wax from the head to the board.

      Using exactly this wouldn’t work well because it is doing it dot by dot. For a board, you want continuous lines. I suppose the wax would not be precise enough that the dots might blend together, though. On the other hand, that would also be bad for resolution.

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