Three-D-Printer

A one-of-one custom FDM 3d printer (2021)

I had luckily stumbled back into the hobbyist FDM 3D Print'iverse just before the pandemic shut the world down. Enabled by a wealth of spare time to sink into learning professional CAD software, and inspired by an active open source community, I aspirationally determined that my pandemic goal was to design and build my very own 3D printer.

At the time, I was fourteen years old and had no practical or applied knowledge of the engineering design process. To solve this predicament, I did what any teenager would do—I spent thousands of hours watching YouTube videos.

Fresh off a few months of Fusion 360 and Solidworks training, I started iterating. During breaks between Zoom classes, I translated each idea into increasingly complex CAD assemblies. Unburdened by trivialities like specifications or planning, I often designed myself into a corner. My age-appropriate solution was brute force: if I got stuck, I would start over. I started over a lot.

First draft of a custom 3d printer — The 'voron-style' heritage of my design is clearly visible in it's first iteration. Also note the chunky plastic parts, an artifact of my age-appropiate inexperience with DFM / DFA.

After a winter of meticulous iteration, I felt ready to invest my hard-earned shekels in an unproven, untested, and original design by an equally unproven, untested, and unoriginal teenager. Six hundred dollars, and a pile of parts printed out on my Creality Ender 3 (the "gold" standard for dirt cheap FDM in 2020, and I mean dirt cheap) later, I had an 80% functional machine to play with.

I would go so far as to call it a minor miracle that the thing I built with a pile of parts ordered off of AliExpress, Amazon, and Misumi actually worked. It printed things!

My '2nd' generation toolhead — The second of three major toolhead revisions. It also features an early draft of my current maker's mark.

high flow toolhead mounted in a custom 3d printer

Machined Plate component for the custom 3d printer

Polycarbonate part printed at high temperatures

Little boats, tchotchkes, and plastic animals soon adorned my desk. But most importantly, the printer could make more parts for itself. Consequently, a year of revisions, modifications, and replacements ensued. I “Ship of Theseus’d” the printer into a machine that rivaled the most capable hobbyist setups in its class. The frame got flipped 90°, the motion system architecture changed (flying gantry to bed lifter!), and the toolhead was completely reworked several times. I covered the side panels in pipe insulation and could heat to ambient temperatures of about 68°C using convection from the heated bed alone, good enough for making usable polycarbonate parts.

In its most enduring configuration, my printer has contributed parts to almost every project I’ve undertaken, from high school competition robotics to countless revisions of packaging for tiny pencil parts.

At the end of the day, I’m grateful that my younger self’s naïve and ambitious printer project—enabled by a once-in-a-lifetime global crisis—was a gateway drug to mechatronics and engineering design.