Ivan Miranda Builds a 3D Printer Large Enough to Duplicate Himself

Ivan Miranda is a maker famous for building really large things and many of those make heavy use of 3D-printed parts. As you would expect, Miranda has a lot of 3D printers to keep up with demand and many of those are quite large to handle the massive volume of the parts. Over the years, he has built several huge custom 3D printers and they're always quite impressive. But his latest project takes the cake. It is an absolutely gargantuan 3D printer that is big enough for Miranda to duplicate himself.

In many ways, an over-sized 3D printer is the same as a regular 3D printer—just scaled up. But that is only true in some regards and only up to a certain size. Once it gets really humongous, standard practices no longer work.

For example, typical Nema 17 stepper motors are very powerful and work well for most 3D printers. But Miranda's newest printer's bed is about a square meter and quite weighty. The printer is also very tall, with about 2 meters of print height. Because it is so tall, lead screws would have been difficult to source and extremelyexpensive. That forced Miranda to use beefy Nema 23 stepper motors with built-in gear systems. Those have the torque necessary to lift the heavy bed.

Standard bed heating elements also wouldn't work here. In the past, Miranda simply connected several silicone heating pads to cover large beds. But that only works if the bed size is a multiple of the heating element size. So Miranda found another solution: heating wire meant for heated flooring. He ran that in a serpentine pattern around the bed to get even coverage, though this isn't capable of heating the bed to high temperatures and it is only suitable for materials like PLA.

The printer's frame is aluminum tube held together with 3D-printed brackets. X-shaped cross braces provide additional rigidity. It has a CoreXY kinematic system and a Duet3D board controls the motors. Miranda had to machine custom gears for the Z-axis pulley system using his own custom CNC mill, but most of the other hardware was off-the-shelf stuff that is common in the 3D printing industry.

To demonstrate the new machine's capability, Miranda 3D-printed a full-size model of himself from a 3D scan. It is the same height as he is, which is something to behold. It may have a few small flaws, but those aren't very noticeable at this scale.