Research and Development in Self-Replicating Open-Source 3D Printing
This assembly robot was made by Benjamin Jenett and Neil Gershenfeld at MIT. As you can see, it crawls over the structure it is building placing identical standard cubic blocks wherever it wishes. It is capable of building large-scale structures; structures
We now have a Github repository for all the work on this project here. See that link for the entire project log. If we want to print a shape, one of the things it would be useful to know is the
We are developing a multi-filament drive to a single nozzle hot end, as mentioned in this previous post about filament stream merging. It will require an in-line filament guillotine, and we have just finished the first version. This is a
In 2018 we posted about our aluminium foundry and how we would like to use it to cast aluminium. We were working on a number of projects so it is not until now that we have now printed a model and
Inspired by Jo Prusa’s flexible printing bed that attached to his machines magnetically, we decided to do the same for our RepRap Fishers. We got some 10mm x 10mm x 5mm neodymium magnets from eBay, and a 200mm square sheet of
Investment casting, or the lost-wax process, is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. A wax master model is made, and repeatedly dunked in liquid clay slip then dried. Each dunk adds a few millimetres of clay until the wax master is
If you just use water in a lasercutter’s cooling system, eventually bugs will grow in it and it will go green and clog the valves, pump, and – worst – the laser tube. Manufacturers recommend changing the water regularly,
Sadly the printed bearings in the previous post do not work as well as one might like… I put it in a lathe at 200 rpm for 10 minutes and the PTFE bearing surfaces wore terribly badly. Sigh… However, we
My design for RepRap Lorenz uses printed sliding bearings with PTFE inserts running on stainless steel tubes: So I thought I’d try printing replacements for rotary journal or needle-roller bearings. Here’s the very first test. It is pretty rigid, and rotates freely. Obviously
Using electroplating we have coated a section of a 3D print in copper. To do this we cleaned up a scrap piece of copper pipe with wire wool. The tube was connected up to the positive side of the power supply