Emily Engineers a 10-Foot-Tall 3D Printer
Check out this massive 10-foot-tall 3D printer built by Emily the Engineer.
Most 3D printers have relatively small build volumes for two reasons. First, conventional designs require that the frame be larger than the build volume, so you need a massive machine to get a massive build volume. Second, 3D printing is slow and print times are directly correlated with part size on FDM/FFF machines — with the square-cube law in full effect. But Emily the Engineer has never let practicality stop her before, so she decided to build a 10-foot-tall 3D printer to churn out towering parts.
Even a very fast 3D printer would take an absurd amount of time to print something that tall using typical settings. But it is possible to shorten that time to something more reasonable using two methods. Printing in vase mode only lays down a single outer perimeter per layer, which means that a single layer can finish as quickly as the printer can circle around. That keeps the layer time down. To reduce the number of layers, Emily equipped the printer with a massive 1mm nozzle that extrudes 0.5mm thick lines. The standard is a 0.4mm nozzle with 0.2mm layers, so this setup cuts the number of layers down by 60%.
This project started as a joke and Emily didn't want to put a big budget behind it, so she started with an old Creality Ender-3. She then replaced the two upright pieces of aluminum extrusion with much, much taller pieces. The new pieces had a different profile, so she had to design and print new rollers to fit.
Emily intended to drive the Z axis with threaded rods as lead screws, but quickly found out that they were far too unstable at that length. So she converted the Ender-3 to a belt-driven Z Axis using KevinAkaSam's design. With a firmware update to change the printer dimensions, Emily was ready for a test run.
This tallboy 3D printer worked. Though, predictably, the part wobbled perpendicular to the Z axis and that caused quality issues. Wider parts were more stable, which mitigated that problem. With that in mind, Emily decided the printer needed a larger bed that would allow for wider parts. So she rebuilt the printer to achieve that.
The results are pretty impressive, especially for a bed-slinger. This printer can, indeed, produce decent super-tall parts. But there are big drawbacks: the parts need to be very wide and printing in vase mode means that they're fragile. However, that didn't stop Emily from printing a giant Among Us character for laughs.
