With the newer generation of quick and reliable 3D printers, we find ourselves with the old collecting dust and cobwebs. You might pull it out for an emergency print, that is if it still works… In the scenario of an eternally resting printer (or ones not worth reviving), trying to give new life to the functional parts is a great idea. This is exactly what [MarkMakies] did with a simple RC rover design from an old Makerbot Replicator clone. 

Using a stepper motor to directly drive each wheel, this rover proves its ability to handle a variety of terrain types. Stepper motors are far from the most common way to drive an RC vehicle, but they can certainly give enough power. Controlling these motors is done from a custom protoboard, allowing the use of RC control. Securing all these parts together only requires a couple of 3D printed parts and the rods used to print them. Throw in a drill battery for power, and you can take it nearly anywhere! 

With the vehicle together [MarkMakies] tested to a rocketing 0.6 m/s fully loaded 4WD. Of course, less weight proves more exciting. While [Mark] recognizes some inherent issues with a stepper-driven all-terrain vehicle, we could see some clever uses for the drive system.

Broken down 3D printers are a dime a dozen, so you should try making something similar by checking out [Mark]’s design files! 3D printers are machines of fine-controlled movement so it’s no surprise to find reuse in these projects is fairly common. Just like this nifty DIY camera slider!

We all love combat robotics for its creative problem solving; trying to fit drivetrains and weapon systems in a small and light package is never as simple as it appears to be. When you get to the real lightweights… throw everything you know out the window! [Shoverobotics] saw this as a barrier for getting into the 150g weight class, so he created the combat robotics platform named Project SVRN.

You want 4-wheel drive? It’s got it! Wedge or a Grabber? Of course! Anything else you can imagine? Feel free to add and modify the platform to your heart’s content! Controlled by a Malenki Nano, a receiver and motor controller combo board, the SVRN platform allows anyone to get into fairyweight fights with almost no experience.

With 4 N10 motors giving quick control, the platform acts as an excellent platform for various bot designs. Though the electronics and structure are rather simple, the most important and impressive part of Project SVRN is the detailed documentation for every part of building the bot. You can find and follow the documentation yourself from [Shoverobotics]’s Printables page here!

If you already know every type of coil found in your old Grav-Synthesized Vex-Flux from your Whatsamacallit this might not be needed for you, but many people trying to get into making need a ramp to shoot for the stars. For those needing more technical know-how in combat robotics, check out Kitten Mittens, a bot that uses its weapon for locomotion!

For all the remarkable improvements we’ve seen in desktop 3D printers, metal printers have tended to stay out of reach for hackers, mostly because they usually rely on precise and expensive laser systems. This makes it all the more refreshing to see [Dan Gelbart]’s demonstration of Rapidia’s cast-to-sinter method, which goes from SLA prints to ceramic or metal models.

The process began by printing the model in resin, scaled up by 19% to account for shrinkage. [Dan] then used the resin print to make a mold out of silicone rubber, after first painting the model to keep chemicals from the resin from inhibiting the silicone’s polymerization. Once the silicone had set, he cut the original model out of the mold and prepared the mold for pouring. He made a slurry out of metal powder and a water-based binder and poured this into the mold, then froze the mold and its contents at -40 ℃. The resulting mixture of metal powder and ice forms a composite much stronger than pure ice, from which [Dan] was able to forcefully peel back the silicone mold without damaging the part. Next, the still-frozen part was freeze-dried for twenty hours, then finally treated in a vacuum sintering oven for twelve hours to make the final part. The video below the break shows the process.

A significant advantage of this method is that it can produce parts with much higher resolution and better surface finish than other methods. The silicone mold is precise enough that the final print’s quality is mostly determined by the fineness of the metal powder used, and it’s easy to reach micron-scale resolution. The most expensive part of the process is the vacuum sintering furnace, but [Dan] notes that if you only want ceramic and not metal parts, a much cheaper ceramic sintering oven will work better.

We’ve seen sintering-based metal printers a few times before, as well a few more esoteric methods. We’ve also covered a few of [Dan]’s previous videos on mechanical prototyping methods and building a precision CNC lathe.

Thanks to [Eric R Mockler] for the tip!

Stripping and cutting wires can be a tedious and repetitive part of your project. To save time in this regard, [Red] built an automatic stripper and cutter to do the tiring work for him.

An ESP32 runs the show in this build. Via a set of A4988 stepper motor drivers, it controls two NEMA 17 stepper motors which control the motion of the cutting and stripping blades via threaded rods. A third stepper controls a 3D printer extruder to move wires through the device. There’s a rotary encoder with a button for controlling the device, with cutting and stripping settings shown on a small OLED display. It graphically represents the wire for stripping, so you can select the length of the wire and how much insulation you want stripped off each end. You merely need select the measurements on the display, press a button, and the machine strips and cuts the wire for you. The wires end up in a tidy little 3D-printed bin for collection.

The build should be a big time saver for [Red], who will no longer have to manually cut and strip wires for future builds. We’ve featured some other neat wire stripper builds before, too. Video after the break.

You can buy all sorts of RC cars off the shelf, but doing so won’t teach you a whole lot. Alternatively, you could follow [TRDB]’s example, and design your own from scratch.

The Lizard, as it is known, is a fun little RC car. It’s got a vaguely Formula 1-inspired aesthetic, and looks fetching with the aid of two-tone 3D printed parts. It’s designed for speed and handling, with a rear-wheel-drive layout and sprung suspension at all four corners to soak up the bumps. The majority of the vehicle is 3D printed in PETG, including the body and the gearbox and differential. However, some suspension components are made in TPU for greater flexibility and resistance to impact. [TRDB] specified commercial off-the-shelf wheels to provide good grip that couldn’t easily be achieved with 3D-printed tires. An ESP32 is responsible for receiving commands from [TRDB’s] custom RC controller running the same microcontroller. It sends commands to the speed controller that runs the Lizard’s brushed DC motor from a 3S lithium-polymer battery.

The final product looks sleek and handles well. It also achieved a GPS-verified top speed of 48 km/h as per [TRDB’s] testing. We’ve seen some other great DIY RC cars over the years, too, like this example that focuses on performance fundamentals. Video after the break.

A treadmill-style bed can be a great addition to a 3D printer. It allows prints to be shifted out of the build volume as printing continues, greatly increasing the size and flexibility of what you can print. But [Ivan Miranda] and [Jón Schone] had a question. Instead of making a treadmill to suit a 3D printer, what if you just built a 3D printer on top of a full-size treadmill?

The duo sourced a piece of real gym equipment for this build. They then set about building a large-scale 3D printer on top of this platform. The linear rails were first mounted on to the treadmill’s frame, followed by a gantry for the print head itself and mounts for the necessary stepper motors. The printer also gained a custom extra-large extruder to ensure a satisfactory print speed that was suitable for the scale of the machine. From there, it was largely a case of fitting modules and running cables to complete the printer.

Soon enough, the machine was printing hot plastic on the treadmill surface, thereby greatly expanding the usable print volume. It’s a little tricky to wrap your head around at first, but when you see it in action, it’s easy to see the utility of a build like this, particularly at large scale. [Ivan] demonstrated this by printing a massive girder over two meters long.

We started seeing attempts at building a belt-equipped “infinite build volume” printer back in 2017, and it took awhile before the concept matured enough to be practical. Even today, they remain fairly uncommon.

The modern hacker and maker has a truly incredible arsenal of tools at their disposal. High-tech tools like 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers have all become commonplace, and combined with old standbys like the drill press and mini lathe, it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home. But occasionally a new tool comes along, and it makes us realize that there are still avenues unexplored for the home gamer.

After spending the last few weeks playing with it, I can confidently say the eufyMake E1 UV printer is one of those tools. The elevator pitch is simple: with a UV printer, you can print anything on anything. As you can imagine, the reality is somewhat more complex, but the fact that you can toss a three dimensional object in the chamber and spray it with a high-resolution color image with a few button presses holds incredible creative potential. Enough that the Kickstarter for the $1,700 printer has already raised a mind-boggling $27 million at the time of this writing, with more than a month yet to go before crossing the finish line.

If you’re on the fence about backing the campaign, or just have doubts about whether or not the machine can do what eufyMake claims, I’ll put those concerns to rest right now — it’s the real deal. Even after using the machine for as long as I have, each time a print job ends, I find myself momentary taken aback by just how good the end result is. The technology inside this machine that not only makes these results possible, but makes them so easily obtainable, is truly revolutionary.

That being said, it’s not a perfect machine by any stretch of the imagination. While I never ran into an outright failure while using the eufyMake E1, there’s a fairly long list of issues which I’d like to see addressed. Some of them are simple tweaks which may well get sorted out before the product starts shipping this summer, while others are fundamental to the way the machine operates and could represent an opportunity for competitors.

Theory of Operation

Before we go any further, I think it’s important to explain how the eufyMake E1 works. Not only because UV printers aren’t the kind of thing that most of us have had first-hand experience with, but because I want readers to understand how much the product gets right.

In the most basic case, you’ll open up the door of the E1, and stick an object on the bed. (There’s a larger bed that you can swap in for over-sized objects, but you have to run the printer with the doors open.) That’s a literal “stick”, by the way, as the bed is designed to be tacky to provide a bit of hold on smaller objects which might otherwise jump around as the machine moves. The E1 will then go through an automated process that includes flashing lights and sweeping red laser beams. This provides the machine with a 3D scan of the object on the bed, which is necessary for positioning the print head later on.

At this point, the software (available for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices) will present the user with a “bird’s eye view” of the bed and any objects on it. From here you can either use the basic art tools in the software, or more likely, import some artwork created in a more comprehensive piece of software. In either event, the process is the same, in that you virtually apply your artwork directly on the overhead image. Once you’re happy with how it looks, you hit “Print”, pick a few options relating to the target’s surface material and the print quality, and off it goes.

Printing is admittedly slower than I had expected. Depending on the image complexity, even a palm-sized job could take 20 or 30 minutes. While I never pushed it so far personally, I’ve heard from other testers that larger projects can take hours to complete. In that way, it’s a lot like a 3D printer — you aren’t the one that has to do all that work, so who cares if the process takes an hour or two, just let it run and come back to it later. In my experience, the results have always been more than worth the wait.

Practical Examples

I’ve said as much previously, but we don’t take reviews and hands-on articles like this lightly here at Hackaday. Companies offer to send us hardware on an almost daily basis, but we turn down the vast majority of them as we just don’t think they’re a great fit for our audience. Is the average Hackaday reader really going to be interested in a review of yet another 3D printer or laser engraver? Probably not.

So before we agreed to take a look at the eufyMake E1, Elliot and I talked a bit about how such a machine would be used in our community specifically. We came up with a few things we thought hardware hackers would want to do with this kind of capability, and I made sure to focus on those applications over the more “crafty” demonstrations that you may have seen elsewhere.

Full-Color PCB Art

While we’re starting to see board fabs support color silkscreens, it’s not a capability that’s necessarily ready for prime time. Beyond the mixed results we’ve heard from those in the community in terms of the quality of the resulting boards, there’s some unfortunate software/vendor lock-in that we’d just as soon avoid. So what if you could skip all that and simply put your professionally made PCBs in the E1 and have it apply your artwork to them?

In this fairly simple example I’ve taken one of the spare boards from my Soma FM badge and applied a few high resolution images onto it. I never really had any doubt that the eufyMake E1 could do PCB art, but still, it was extremely satisfying to see it in person.

Control Panels

High quality control panels have always been tricky to produce at home. Sure there’s ways to pull it off, such as the recent trick we covered that used specially treated inkjet printouts, but they tend to be time consuming and the results are highly dependent on the material you’re working working. With the UV printer, front panels are a breeze and you’ll get consistent results whether you’re working with plastic or metal.

For this example I came up with a flight-sim style panel inspired by various fighter jets. The workflow was actually quite nice: I designed the panel itself in OpenSCAD, and then exported it as both a 3D STL and 2D DXF file. The 3D file got printed out, and the 2D file was imported into Inkscape. With a 1:1 outline of the panel in Inkscape, I could position the text and images knowing they would line up perfectly with the real-world object. I exported my Inkscape design as an SVG, loaded it into the E1’s software, and applied it to the printed panel.

Truly Custom Keycaps

We’ve seen incredible interest in bespoke keyboards over the last few years, and customized keycaps are a big part of that.  But even the most decked out keyboards are generally still using off-the-shelf keycaps. But why settle for that when you can buy blank caps and apply whatever text or artwork you wish on them?

These are such a perfect application for the E1 that I imagine it’s going to ignite something of a custom keycap revolution once the printer gets into consumer’s hands. Whether you want each key to be the face of a different anime character, or want all the legends to be in Comic Sans, you have complete control. They also serve as a great example of the fine detail work that’s possible on the machine.

The Perfect PCB Machine?

I know what you’re thinking: “Stop teasing me, can the damn thing make PCBs or not!” The short answer is yes…but the long answer is worth a bit more examination.

The UV print seems to work very well as an etch resist, as it was completely unfazed by its encounter with ferric chloride. In fact, the first challenge was figuring out how to get the stuff off after etching. Alcohol, turpentine, and paint thinner did nothing to it. Eventually I found that soaking the board in acetone will break down the bond between the printed layer and the copper — you still need to peel it off, but once you get under an edge with a razor blade it parts without too much trouble.

Early results look promising. The lines aren’t as clean as I’d like, so it will probably have problems with tight pitch parts, but the traces were intact down to 0.2 mm, and the pads for the SOIC8 footprint I picked as a test were properly isolated from each other. At this point, it’s a working PCB that’s at least as good as something made with the old school toner transfer method. But the E1 promises so much more.

Putting the board back in the machine, I was able to spray it with additional layers that act as both a soldermask and silkscreen. While I want to experiment a bit more and refine the techniques involved, even this first attempt produced a remarkably professional looking board with very little manual effort on the user’s part.

That said, while this proof of concept shows it’s clearly possible to produce impressive boards on the machine, the process is made frustrating by various limitations of the hardware and software.

One-Off Versus Production

Let’s be clear, as a product, the eufyMake E1 is designed to let crafty folks put pictures of their kids on slate coasters and emblazon mugs with the logo of their favorite sports team. The software and hardware is clearly designed to make it as easy as possible to toss an object into the printer, get your image virtually aligned on it, and then spray it on. At this, the product excels, and I have no doubt it will be a commercial success.

But while hardware hackers are certainly not immune to the charms of putting memes and logos on their possessions, we also have slightly higher demands. If we’re talking about using it for producing PCBs, or even just adding art to existing boards, we’re looking for high positional accuracy and repeatability.

To that end, I have to report that the E1 is not particularly well suited to such technical tasks. It can be pushed into service, but there’s several aspects of the product that would really need to be addressed before this could be a workhorse for the hackerspace.

Lack of Physical Indexing

As it stands, the bed on the eufyMake E1 is a completely flat surface, with no provisions for work holding or indexing. You’re expected to visually align your print each time — workable for one or two copies of an object, but excruciating beyond that.

Now you might be thinking that this is an easy enough problem to remedy…but you’re probably forgetting that 3D bed scan. Any fixture you come up with to hold your object in position runs the risk of screwing up the scan and causing the print to abort. Even trying to tape a PCB down with blue painter’s tape would occasionally trigger an error during the scan as the machine couldn’t find a clearly defined edge.

As you’ll see below, I’ve had some success with very thin 3D printed fixtures that avoid the ire of the scanner. Long term, I’d like to see an alternate bed that resembled a CNC fixture plate, so that multiple parts can be held in position with low-profile pegs.

The Parallax View

At the suggestion of Thomas Flummer, I printed out a few thin (1.2 mm) jigs that could be taped down to the bed and help position multiple objects for batch processing. This is much better than having to eyeball things each time, but it uncovered a new issue.

For objects in the center of the bed, the optical alignment system works pretty well. It should get you within a millimeter or so on the first attempt, but it’s way off on the edges of the bed. Take a look at the following example: the in the software, both blue rectangles were perfectly aligned within the footprint of the 1206 LED:

As you can see the alignment on the board in the center is pretty locked in, but on the other board, it’s halfway out of the footprint. This might be close enough if you’re making grandma some Christmas ornaments, but it won’t cut it for SMD work.

The good news is that you can go back into the software and move objects at the sub-millimeter level by typing in the desired coordinates. This will cause the visual representation to become misaligned, but so long as you know where the target is in the real-world, it doesn’t matter. So if you can afford a bit of trial-and-error, it’s possible to get the alignment dialed in even across multiple objects on the bed.

The Shape of Things to Come?

As I said at the start, the eufyMake E1 is not a perfect machine. Beyond the major issues I’ve outlined here, there’s all sorts of weird quirks and limitations I’ve run into during my time with it. For example, why don’t the lights inside the enclosure turn on when the door is open? Why doesn’t the printer itself have a small screen to display status information? We won’t even get into the fact that all your interactions with the printer have to go through the cloud — there isn’t even so much as a USB port on the printer to allow local control.

But at the end of the day, I’m still extremely excited about this machine. The fact is, there’s really nothing else quite like it on the market, at least, not at this price anyway. It reminds me a bit of the MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer, or even the K40 laser. It represents such a huge leap forward in capability for the individual that it’s easy to excuse the rough edges.

Like those machines, I believe the eufyMake E1 will set many of the standards for the products that come after it. You may never own this particular UV printer, but I’m willing to bet that after a few hardware generations, when the cost of the technology is driven even lower thanks to increased competition, the printer that you do buy will be able to trace its lineage back to this moment.

There’s just some joy in an instant camera. They were never quality cameras, even in the glory days of Polaroid, but somehow the format has survived while the likes of Kodachrome have faded away. [Mellow_Labs] decided he wanted the instacam experience without the Polaroid pricing, so he made his own in the video embedded after the break.

At its core, it’s a simple project: an ESP32-CAM for the image (these were never great cameras, remember, so ESP32 is fine– and do you really get to call it an instant camera if you have to wait for a Raspberry Pi to boot up?) and a serial thermal printer for the “instant photo”part. This admittedly limits the project to black and white, and pretty low res, but B/W is artistic and Lo-Fi is hip, so this probably gives the [Mellow Labs] camera street cred with the kids, somehow. Honestly, this reminds us more of the old Gameboy Camera and its printer than anything made by Polaroid, and we are here for it.

The build video goes through the challenges [Mellow Labs] found interfacing the serial printer to the ESP32–which went surprisingly well for what looks like mostly vibe coding, though we’re not sure how much time he spent fixing the vibe code off camera–as well as a the adventure of providing a case that includes the most absurdly beefy battery we’ve ever seen on a camera. Check out the full video below.

Instant cameras are no stranger to Hackaday: this one used e-ink; this one uses film, but is made of gingerbread. In 2022 we wondered if we’d ever shake the Polaroid picture, and the answer appears to be “no” so far.

Thanks to [Mellow] for tooting his own horn by submitting this project to the tip line. We love to see what our readers get up to, so please– toot away!

If you had asked us yesterday “How do you 3D Print a Photo”, we would have said “well, that’s easy, do a lithophane”– but artist, hacker and man with a very relaxing voice [Wyatt Roy] has a much more impressive answer: Gaussian splats, rendered in resin.

Gaussian splats are a 3D scanning technique aimed at replicating a visual rather than geometry, like the mesh-based 3D-scanning we usually see on Hackaday. Using photogrammetry, a point cloud is generated with an associated 3D Gaussian function describing the colour at that point. Blend these together, and you can get some very impressive photorealistic 3D environments. Of course, printing a Gaussian smear of colour isn’t trivial, which is where the hacking comes in.

[Wyatt] first generates the Gaussian splats with an app called Polycam, which outputs inscrutable binary .ply files. With AI assistance of dubious quality, [Wyatt] first created a python script to decompile this data into an ASCII file, which is then fed into a Rhino script to create geometry for printing. Rather than try and replicate the Gaussian splat at each point perfectly, which would melt his PC, [Wyatt] uses 14-face isospheres to approximate the 3D Gaussian functions. These then get further postprocessing to create a printable mesh.

Printing this isn’t going to be easy for most of us, because [Wyatt] is using a multi-color DLP resin printer. The main body is clear resin, and black or white resin used for the space defined by the isospheres created from the Gaussian Splat. When the interior color is white, the effect is quite similar to those acrylic cubes you sometimes see, where a laser has etched bubbles into their depths, which makes us wonder if that might be a more accessible way to use this technique.

We talked about Gaussian splats when the technique was first announced, but it’s obvious the technology has come a long way since then. We did feature a hack with multicolor resin prints last year, but it was much more manual than the fancy machine [Wyatt] uses here. Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the tip.

Typewriters aren’t really made anymore in any major quantity, since the computer kind of rained all over its inky parade. That’s not to say you can’t build one yourself though, as [Toast] did in a very creative fashion.

After being inspired by so many typewriters on YouTube, [Toast] decided they simply had to 3D print one of their own design. They decided to go in a unique direction, eschewing ink ribbons for carbon paper as the source of ink. To create a functional typewriter, they had to develop a typebar mechanism to imprint the paper, as well as a mechanism to move the paper along during typing. The weird thing is the letter selection—the typewriter doesn’t have a traditional keyboard at all. Instead, you select the letter of your choice from a rotary wheel, and then press the key vertically down into the paper. The reasoning isn’t obvious from the outset, but [Toast] explains why this came about after originally hitting a brick wall with a more traditional design.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a typewriter of your own, [Toast]’s example shows that you can have a lot of fun just by having a go and seeing where you end up. We’ve seen some other neat typewriter hacks over the years, too. Video after the break.

[Thanks to David Plass for the tip!]

When you start building lots of something, you’ll know the value of accurate fixturing. [Chris Borge] learned this the hard way on a recent mass-production project, and decided to solve the problem. How? With a custom fixturing tool! A 3D printed one, of course.

Chris’s build is simple enough. He created 3D-printed workplates covered in a grid of specially-shaped apertures, each of which can hold a single bolt. Plastic fixtures can then be slotted into the grid, and fastened in place with nuts that thread onto the bolts inserted in the base. [Chris] can 3D print all kinds of different plastic fixtures to mount on to the grid, so it’s an incredibly flexible system.

3D printing fixtures might not sound the stoutest way to go, but it’s perfectly cromulent for some tasks. Indeed, for [Chris]’s use case of laser cutting, the 3D printed fixtures are more than strong enough, since the forces involved are minimal. Furthermore, [Chris] aided the stability of the 3D-printed workplate by mounting it on a laser-cut wooden frame filled with concrete. How’s that for completeness?

We’ve seen some other great fixturing tools before, too. Video after the break.

RepRap was the origin of pushing hobby 3D printing boundaries, and here we see a RepRap scaled down to the smallest detail. [Vik Olliver] over at the RepRap blog has been working on getting a printer working printing down to the level of micron accuracy.

The printer is constructed using 3D printed flexures similar to the OpenFlexure microscope. Two flexures create the XYZ movement required for the tiny movements needed for micron level printing. While still in the stages of printing simple objects, the microscopic scale of printing is incredible.

[Vik] managed to print a triangular pattern in resin at a total size of 300 µm. For comparison SLA 3D printers struggle at many times that scale. Other interesting possibilities from this technology could be printing small scale circuits from conductive resins, though this might require some customization in the resin department.

In addition to printing with resin, µRepRap can be seen making designs in marker ink such as our own Jolly Wrencher! At only 1.5 mm the detail is impressive especially when considering the nature of scratching away ink.

If you want to make your own µRepRap head over to [Vik Olliver]’s GitHub. The µRepRap project has been a long going project. From the time it started the design has changed quite a bit. Check out an older version of the µRepRap project based around OpenFlexure!

Despite the best efforts of the RepRap community over the last twenty years, self-replicating 3D printers have remained a stubbornly elusive goal, largely due to the difficulty of printing electronics. [Brian Minnick]’s fully-printed 3D printer could eventually change that, and he’s already solved an impressive number of technical challenges in the process.

[Brian]’s first step was to make a 3D-printable motor. Instead of the more conventional stepper motors, he designed a fully 3D-printed 3-pole brushed motor. The motor coils are made from solder paste, which the printer applies using a custom syringe-based extruder. The paste is then sintered at a moderate temperature, resulting in traces with a resistivity as low as 0.001 Ω mm, low enough to make effective magnetic coils.

Brushed motors are less accurate than stepper motors, but they do have a particularly useful advantage here: their speed can be controlled simply by varying the voltage. This enables a purely electromechanical control system – no microcontroller on this printer! A 3D-printed data strip encodes instructions for the printer as holes in a plastic sheet, which open and close simple switches in the motor controller. These switches control the speed, direction, and duration of the motors’ movement, letting the data strip encode motion vectors.

Remarkably, the hotend on this printer is also 3D-printed. [Brian] took advantage of the fact that PEEK’s melting point increases by about 110 ℃ when it’s annealed, which should allow an annealed hotend to print itself. So far it’s only extruded PLA, but the idea seems sound.

The video below the break shows a single-axis proof of concept in action. We haven’t been able to find any documentation of a fully-functional 3D printer, but nevertheless, it’s an impressive demonstration. We’ve covered similar printers before, and if you make progress in this area, be sure to send us a tip.