Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “3D Printing Ceramics With The Cerambot Eazao : First Look”.
Welcome to make workshop, where we check out tools, toys and tech built for makers. Today we’re going to be looking at desktop ceramic 3d printing. This is the saranbot ezow. It’S a 3d printer that prints ceramics, clays, pretty much any kind of paste you can put through it.
You can make stuff like this. Ceramics are pretty cool because they’re food, safe they’re, you know usually better on the environment than plastics, and personally, i just love the way that they feel in my hand, time for some disclaimers. This video is not sponsored by saranbot. I actually um paid for the original printer that i had that i did the previous video on, but they did send us this printer to check out and it’s currently on kickstarter um. You know with every kickstarter. You need to look at it very skeptically and be ready to give your money away if you’re not going to get a product.
That being said, i personally did back the last one and i got the last 3d printer um, but you know we can’t make any kind of guarantees on behalf of kickstarter or saranbot. I just really thought it was a cool printer and i wanted to show it off a little bit so um we got one so by now, most people are familiar with 3d printers. So let’s talk about what makes this a ceramic 3d printer.
Well, it looks like a standard 3d printer. You have your bed that moves side to side, your extruder that moves back and forth, and this whole arm goes up and down on a lead screw. But there’s no heating elements, there’s no heated bed, no heated extruder and the extruder itself is quite different than what you’ve probably seen.
This is a paste extruder. It has two parts: it has this huge canister over here with a plunger. This one is mechanical. It uses a geared down motor to really apply pressure. Then a hose will take the material from this tube of clay up into here.
Once it gets in here, there’s an auger, a very cool, looking spirally thing that pushes it down out of the nozzle, and you can really push any paste through this. In my last video, you probably saw me printing peanut butter, and in this article they were very smart. They sent me pre-packaged tubes of clay because preparing the clay is a bit of a pain we’ll get into more of that in a little bit and i was able to 3d print some ceramic items. The ease out operates basically, like any other 3d printer that you are used to you.
Take your model, you throw it in a slicer. You put the proper settings in you feed that file. Then, after it’s been sliced to your printer and you print it, there are some different steps with this machine than just regular printing with 3d filament. You have to prepare your material first, which is kind of a long and grueling process of wetting down your material folding. It all together trying to get that perfect consistency and then loading it into the tubes to be used, and then, after you print, there’s a whole process. That’S going to involve taking your material and finishing it.
How it needs to be finished. That’S usually involves firing it in a kiln for a certain amount of time, so there is a bit of a learning curve here that is different than standard 3d. Printing, hey it’s time to upgrade your maker skills and the best way to do that is to learn from other makers. We’Ve launched a system called makercampus.com, where makers can teach other makers how to do stuff go check it out right now, makercampus.com, there’s classes ranging from how to do simple circuits with with textiles and paper to you know, designing things in fusion and 3d, printing and code And working with arduinos and building robots check it out. Makercampus.Com cerambot does not provide a slicer. They recommend that you use cura and that’s one area that i found a tiny bit of frustration, because then you have to program in the machine and tweak all of the settings to get it to work right.
However, they do supply a configuration file that you can load into cura. That gets you most of the way there. I still had to tweak some things it and i’m still figuring out how to get it just right. This time around, though they did make the smart move of offering a microwave kiln.
So if you can’t afford a full-sized kiln, you can get these microwave kilns. You can actually order these for pretty cheap on amazon or you can buy one directly through saranbot. This gives you a small amount of space that you can put an item and actually put it in your microwave, and this gets up to a hot enough temperature inside to fire the item and solidify it and finish it off. That is extremely useful for those of us that maybe just want to dabble in this, don’t want to invest in a kiln, don’t have the space for a kiln. We can still make some small items and finish them off in our homes, and that is very nice. This printer works relatively quickly. The layer heights that you’re going to see are about a millimeter tall and, of course, you can mess with all this. You could cut your nozzle to be fatter and wider print, bigger things and you’re really only limited by the space on this platform.
As far as the size goes, um, of course, if you’re printing, bigger than what this can hold you’re going to have to fire it in a kiln, the ease out is currently a kickstarter. I believe the kickstarter is four to five hundred dollars to back it retail. It’S gon na be closer to eight or nine hundred dollars if you’re into ceramics and you’re familiar with that process, or you want to tinker with them. I found this to be incredibly easy to get started with really the learning curve here.
For me, as somebody who’s used to 3d printing is more on the ceramic side, on mixing it to the proper consistency that takes a little bit of learning on being able to feed it into the tube without getting big air bubbles in it, and then on the Process of firing in the process of using um the different coatings you can get for ceramics, uh, those all have different formulas of temperatures that they have to be fired at and stuff like that, and i’m still learning all that there’s. You know a pretty steep learning curve there, but when it comes to getting the model out of the printer, this is uh gotten very, very simple and i’m really having fun with it. Now again, this is a kickstarter back it at your own risk. But if you want to learn more about this, you can go to ezow.com or find the link below to their kickstarter thanks for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed it be sure to like and subscribe for more awesome videos from this channel. You .