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.
This is amazing. Any chance of mounting it vertically?
oops I meant horizontally
Please stop filming with potatoes. What was used this time? A Nokia 3210?
Yep.
Brian, what’s the best breed of potato you find to record? Most of the potatoes I use seem to have root access problems to the SD cards I jam in.
to access root, simply leave the potato in a cup of water for a week.
Also always check if your chips are well sealed. They ain’t cheap!
Always use certified seed potatoes to avoid viruses
Looks more like a dSLR shooting a bit too wide open for the operator to handle properly.
I don’t understand why people don’t like the video that comes out of our key-chain cam mounted on the cheapest quadcopter we could find?
I just wish that pellet extruders were more feasible on smaller scale printers.
Have to say using a shopvac was a brilliant way to move the pellets to the extruder.
This one needs really small pellets..
http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=26907
I wanna know how stiff this design is. Can it handle light milling with a small spindle head instead?
Looks like used extra Viagra for this one.
Maybe engraving, certainly not milling unless you’re doing foam or balsa wood.
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…
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.
They had this at the Detroit Faire. They didn’t quite get it printing there, they had some heater issues.
That was sharp to use the shopvac as they have
I have a dream: a Maker Faire, hackers meeting, whatever… with everything but 3D printers. Just one, please. Asking too much?
When will this be commercially available? How much? NOW SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
I was quoted $60,000.
Awesome! :-)
Waiting for someone to hook this up to a 3d laser scanner and make a full-scale model of themselves.
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.
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??
I know, right? Magnificent giant printer, and all they can think of to show off its capabilities is a super simplistic vase? :P