Tag Archives: extruder

This ‘pasta printing press’ lets you create and mass-produce your own custom pasta shapes!

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Somewhere in Italy, a visibly distressed Nonna is wondering what’s wrong with the world!

The Parola Pasta machine is a unique combination of a pasta-maker and your old-fashioned printing press. Designed by Nikita Nietzke, a student at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design), Parola Pasta reinvents one of the world’s most famous food categories, bringing automation in a new form to it. Modeled on the kind of machine Johannes Gutenberg developed in the 15th century, the Parola Pasta lets you extrude pasta dough in any alphabetical design. The machine uses a set of extruder plates that can be placed together to create words, and then after that it’s all about creating the alphabet-soup-equivalent of pasta!

The machine is hand-cranked (although that can easily be automated) and requires you to manually cut the pasta shape out at intervals. The pasta is then laid out on a wooden tray which automatically moves to make space for the next pasta piece. The tray docks in the Parola Pasta machine’s base, letting you dry it out for future use. The machine could, in theory, work with any kind of dough, allowing you to used colored pasta (spinach or beetroot) or even make things interesting by popping in some cookie dough instead! An ‘AMORE’ shaped cookie would definitely hit the sweet spot, wouldn’t it?

Designer: Nikita Neitzke

MIT’s mobile 3D printer built the largest structure to date

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Your next house could be built by a robot. Following the recent success of San Francisco-based startup Apis Cor, a team of MIT researchers have created a mobile autonomous 3D printer of their own. And to prove that the prototype works, the team had i...

Renegade 3D Pen Turns Empty Bottles into Art

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Some of the coolest stuff turns up on Kickstarter. I remember when the 3Doodler first showed up there a few years ago, I thought that was really cool but didn’t like the idea of expensive filaments to purchase to keep using the pen. A new 3D pen has turned up on Kickstarter called Renegade. But unlike the 3Doodler, you can get this device with a cutter that turns plastic bottles into tape filament.

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The unique screw feeder mechanism of the Renegade pen can then take the tape you made and slurp it into the extruder, melt it and then spit it out so you can make art with the molten result.

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According to its makers: “Renegade can use 5 to 7 mm strips cut from PET plastic bottles, plastic bags, or plastic files with a thickness of 0.14 to 0.35mm. It can also use standard PLA, ABS, nylon, TPE, HIPS, wood and other types of filament with a diameter of 1,75 mm.” That gives you the flexibility to use both your own recycled plastic strips and off-the-shelf filaments. Being able to shred those old bottles sounds like the best way to make stuff on the cheap.

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The Renegade pen has already beaten its funding goal 21 days to go. The pen, along with the bottle shredder tool will cost you about $105 with initial shipping set for January 2017.

Discov3ry 3D Printer Paste Extruder: Copy with Paste

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A couple of months ago we talked about the Rabbit Proto, an add-on that lets existing 3D printers print with conductive ink and other viscous materials. Structur3D’s Discov3ry extruder is like Rabbit Proto, but it’s designed to be more versatile from the get go.

discov3ry 3d printer universal paste extruder by structur3dmagnify

Discov3ry works with “any stepper motor based, fused deposition modeling (FDM) desktop 3D printer system.” All you have to do is switch out a printer’s printing tip with Discov3ry’s feed tube and extruder tip, then connect Discov3ry’s wiring to the printer. Now you can print with even more kinds of materials, including icing, ceramics, polyurethane, silicone and yes, conductive ink.

discov3ry 3d printer universal paste extruder by structur3d 7 620x566magnify

The Discov3ry will come with reusable food-grade syringes, tubing, connectors and tips to help you get started. Because printing parameters will have to be adjusted depending on the material you want to use, Structur3d will also provide documentation as well as setup a forum for users to exchange tips on using the extruder with different materials.

Pledge about $275 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Discov3ry extruder as a reward. With your help, someday Structur3d will be able to afford the letter “E.”

[via Gigaom]

Hyrel 3D Printer Can Print with Play-Doh

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3D printing continues to evolve, with printers improving in precision, speed and cost efficiency. While some high end machines can print in materials ranging from plastic to metal and even ceramic, this is the first time I’ve heard of a 3D printer that can output soft and squishy materials, like clay.

hyrel play doh printer

The Hyrel 3D printer offers the ability to swap out their regular PLA/ABS plastic filament extruder with a special unit which can extrude soft materials. The printer can be loaded with air-dry modeling clay, Play-Doh, Plasticine, Silicone or even Sugru, a durable, self-setting and flexible rubber compound that’s good for fixing and hacking all kinds of stuff. Here’s some footage of the Hyrel outputting Sugru and then some Play-Doh:

I’m not exactly sure why you’d want to sculpt 3D objects in Play-Doh, since it’s not designed to harden, but clay or Sugru could produce some interesting results for sure. And for Play-Doh fans, it sure beats a Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop.

[Hyrel via ToolGuyd]