Very Large FFF Printer.

I searched for "WOOF," the group that built this thing and didn't find it on these forums, so I decided I'd post it here.

They built an extruder and stuck it on a CNC plasma cutter to make a printer large enough to print a small canoe.

Huge 3D Printer

Also, if you look at the extruder photo and read the article, it seems like their extruder uses shredded plastic directly. Does anyone know of something like that for a Rep Rap? It would definitely make recycling plastic easier since there would be no need to make filament out of it.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2012 12:22AM by MaFraL.

That's pretty cool. The rules of the boat race they entered say it has to use milk jugs for flotation, doesn't say that they can't be shredded, melted and reassembled

I remember these guys saying they want to print a canoe from shredded milk jugs, I thought "ok, here we go again", but they proved it works.

I don't think using shredded plastic directly will work for repraps - nowhere near the required volumetric accuracy. The boat is cool, but the quality of printing is lousy (not hating on it, clearly was good enough) so i'm not sure there would be much to learn from it. I suspect the plastic is full of air bubbles which are fine there, but wouldn't extrude from a fine nozzle cleanly.

Okay, that makes sense. I was wondering why I hadn't seen any way of using shredded plastic directly when I was looking at the projects to recycle plastic and make filament.

Hey, all, my name is Brandon, and I'm part of the WOOF group that built this printer, which we affectionately call Big Red.

Big Red does indeed extrude the shredded plastic directly. A recycling place by the name of ScrapBlasters helped us grind the jugs down to flakes that are about 1/4 to 1/8 of a centimeter in area. This flakes were poured into a hopper, and an auger pushed them through to the hot end. As James pointed out, though, it's not very precise, and we would like to move to a filament extruder. We went with direct extrusion this time around due to time constraints.

If you're interested, Our newborn "official site" can be found here. Our blog, which contains all of our current progress can be found here.

We are completely open about our work and projects, so if anyone has any questions about the boat, Big Red, or our group in general, ask away!

Oh, hi. I guess it's not surprising that one of you would find out about something in the RepRap forums. I'll have to look at that website later.