Printrbot - 3D Printing Goodness!

After much blood sweat and tears (literally) my endless CNC mill projects have yet again gone back to the drawing board...

However this time with success! The printrbot is simple, relatively cheap 3D printer that is easy to build providing you can get hold of the initial 3D printed parts. It was designed by Brooke Drumm at http://printrbot.com/ and has been quite a success.

If you don't know about these 3D printers, they are essentially a three axis machine with a very fine hot nozzle that extrudes various types of plastic, layer by layer, into a physical 3D object.

i.e. you can make pretty much any plastic part you want and for anything you want!

I used my Zen Toolworks CNC machine rigged up with hot nozzle and print bed to start it all off...

Now that I have a fully operational machine, I've expanded on the idea by designing my very own X carriage material extruder: Thingiverse - Simple Extruder

Here's a little video of the whole thing working...

I will have much more content coming up so keep an eye open! Now that I can make physical parts quickly, there will be less time wasted cutting, drilling and filing bits of plastic for the odd jobs that one may come across in usual engineering shenanigans...