3D Printer

3D-printers are getting increasingly popular because of their innovative technique. They offer lots of possibilities to produce various products. Prototypes, shoes, dresses, body parts and prostheses, chairs, rocket parts; lots of products are already made using 3D-printers.

At FabLab Wageningen we have 4 different 3-D printers: a Prusa I3 Mk3s, a Prusa Mk4S and a Prusa CoreOne FDM printer and a Prusa SL1S SLA printer. You can use these by printing ready-made digital designs or by first making your own digital design and then printing it.

Our FDM-printers use filament, thread on a spool which is molten inside the print head. We mostly use PLA, a recyclable plastic which is made out of raw materials of vegetable origins, but other filaments are potentially possible, as ABS, Nylon and PET, or even filaments containing (small) amounts of wood, metal or other materials. Our SLA-printer uses resin, that hardens under UV-light.

The resin printer needs special training to work with, as resin is a hazardous material, and after printing the prints needs to be cleaned and cured using a special process.

Work at home ? This is what you already can do:

At home, you can already design using ‘FreeCAD’ or ‘Blender’ and slice your model with ‘Prusa Slicer’ – all free and Open Source programs you can download on your own PC.