Lego Printer Prints Lego

lego 3d printer

[Gosse Adema] made his very first instructable by detailing his Lego 3D printer build. It’s Prusa i3 based, and originally started out as an A4 plotter with repurposed steppers out of an old HP printer. After upgrading to some NEMA 17 steppers, it became a full-blown 3D printer.

It turns out that NEMA 17 stepper mounting holes align perfectly with Lego, making it super easy to mount them. Check out this Lego ‘datasheet’ for some great details on measurements.

The brains of the printer are occupied by Marlin running atop a Atmega 2560, and Pronterface for the PC software. He tops it off with a Geeeteck built MK8 extruder boasting a 0.3 mm nozzle that accepts 1.75 mm filament.

As with almost any DIY 3D printer build, his first prints didn’t turn out so well. After adjusting the nozzle and filament size in the software, he started to get some good results. Be sure to check out the video below to see this Lego 3D printer in action.

23 thoughts on “Lego Printer Prints Lego

        1. Sure you can. eg. “Look at all those Fords in the parking lot”, or “My wife and I both bought Fords”. A better comparison would be with “lumber”. You would say “I built this coffee table with some lumber I had lying around” , or “… with some pieces of lumber I had lying around.”, but not “I built this coffee table with some lumbers I had lying around”

      1. One saturday when I was really drunk I googled for Lego blogs and so forth that used the phrase “LEGO bricks” and posted “It’s ‘Legos'” in their comments sections. Easiest troll ever.

    1. You are right. Having all LEGO production centrally located in Denmark is much more efficient. Fist they are injection molded, sorted, and wrapped in paper and plastic. Put it on to a boat that takes 30-60 days across a vast ocean. Then it is received and put on a diesel truck to go to a distribution center and put on another truck to arrive at a store near you is much more efficient. It is waaaaay dumb to just press print and have what you require without waste. That’s why they have one on the space station because NASA is full of dumb people.

      1. You use far more energy printing each lego individually than all that it takes to get them from Denmark to you.

        A thousand piece set? 17,000 minutes on the printer, 12 days of printing back to back. The lego factory cranks that with a single press of a die.

    1. I wonder what would happen if you fed this one (10/18) the schematic for the new entry.
      Between the two, will it self assemble everything but the electronics, given filament?

  1. A childhood dream turned sour: a machine that made out of legos that spits out even more legos, but the error on the resulting part is such that it is really a machine made out of legos that spits out megablox

Leave a Reply to Gosse AdemaCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.