3D printed engine

2 Articles

Thermoacoustic Stirling Engine Is Now Fully 3D Printable

August 21, 2026 by 25 Comments

Would you like to make your own energy? Why, who doesn’t in this era of rising costs! A Stirling engine always looks like a good fit for that: highly efficient, with no risk of a boiler explosion. A thermoacoustic Stirling engine looks even better, since it has only one moving part at the output end. A thermoacoustic Stirling engine you can 3D print yourself looks best of all, and that’s what [my engines] has on offer, now that even the burner and hot end of his thermoacoustic engine are designed for SLA metal printing.

We previously reported on the open-source engine, but there’ve been some improvements worth talking about. For one thing, he’s integrated a biogas/methane burner directly inside the 3D-printable hotend. For another, that 3D-printed design allows for an excellent heat exchange geometry that would be very hard to get any other way. The whole thing is open source with plans available at OwnEnergy.org, where you can find links to the apparently mandatory Discord channel and now an old-style forum to actually collaborate on the design, which is open-source. The site is also now the home of all data and discussion about [my engines]’s homescale biogas plant, which is the power source for this little engine.

If you’d rather print a combustion engine, you can do that, too, but you’ll need more “vitamins” than this unit requires.

Continue reading “Thermoacoustic Stirling Engine Is Now Fully 3D Printable” →

3D Printed Engine Chugs Away On Balloon Power

March 10, 2017 by 32 Comments

So often, 3D printer owners buy their machines with the promise of freeing themselves from the shackles of commercial manufactured items, and making all sorts of wonderful and useful things to improve their lives. Then they proceed to print a menagerie of good luck cats and toy elephants, that little tugboat, and a host of other pretty but ultimately useless items in garishly colored filament.

Perhaps this is an unfair assessment, but if you have the sneaking feeling that it might just describe you then could we point you at something that while it still has little use is at least interesting to play with. [Gzumwalt]’s single cylinder air engine is as its name suggests, a piston engine that runs on compressed air. You don’t need a shop compressor though, your lungs or an inflated balloon will suffice.

It’s a simple enough design, but it does incorporate two connecting rods, one of which drives a sliding valve. All the files are available for download, and there is a video we’ve placed below the break showing it chugging away nicely from a balloon. It might not be the most useful of engines and it may not bring you good luck, but it beats a plastic menagerie in the interest stakes.

Continue reading “3D Printed Engine Chugs Away On Balloon Power” →