I Built A Clay 3D Printer That Prints Impossible Objects

I designed a 3D printer that can print real ceramics. Double-walled cups, rock-climbing crimp cups, and even chainmail. And best of all, it's all open source and costs less than $300. And the material? Well, it's literally as cheap as dirt. But printing with clay is a nightmare. It's effectively liquid sandpaper pressurized to 100 psi, destroying my extruder every few hours and going everywhere except where you want it to go. But first, let's start with how the thing actually prints ceramics. Clay is loaded into a tube and pushed towards the extruder using air. This brings it to an auger, which precisely controls how much clay is pushed through the nozzle. I went through half a dozen auger designs before landing on this one. It lets trapped air out the top, helping prevent gaps in the flow, while metering clay precisely enough to even perform retractions. Clay printing is a balancing act. The clay has to be soft enough to squeeze through the nozzle, but stiff enough to not slump into a ceramic puddle. So instead of watering it down, I force it through the system with as much pressure as my $40 Aliexpress compressor can muster. This often can lead to explosive results when things go wrong, covering my apartment in a fine spattering of clay. But the real challenge wasn't printing the clay, it was keeping the extruder from destroying itself. If you thought carbon fiber filament was abrasive, wait until you see what ceramics does to an extruder. Clay looks soft, but if you zoom in it's basically a slurry full of tiny rocks, grinding away at everything it touches. My auger style extruder would require an entire rebuild every hour or two. Even my metal nozzle didn't stand a chance. I tried basically every 3D printed material, even a dual material print with this funky igus low friction stuff, but eventually I caved and got the entire assembly made out of SLS printed stainless steel by JLCPCB, and annoyingly that actually worked. The steel extruder has survived longer than every printed version combined, and it's impressively good value compared to PPSCF or that igus filament. Which brings me to this video's sponsor, JLCPCB. They provided the metal extruder parts, including these absolutely unnecessary titanium augers which are pretty sick. I've been using JLCPCB for years now, well before they started sponsoring me. I think the first 3D printed part I got from them were these metal shutters in their 3D printed film video camera I made back in 2022, when they had just launched their metal 3D printing service. I've had dozens of parts made by them in the years since and have nothing but good things to say about them, so it's great that they've been a longtime partner of this channel. But anyway, back to the video. Getting the extruder to stop eating itself was only half the battle. Every print took an absurd amount of work. Wedge the clay, load the tube, clean the extruder, print it, dry it, fire it, glaze it, then fire it again, or maybe just end up with a cup themed puzzle. I mean, my apartment has been taken over by cups for almost a year now, and I've printed almost 100 cups, with only a handful of them making it all the way to being usable. I was plagued by drooping overhangs, inconsistent extrusion, ugly seams, and cracking during firing due to clay's insane shrinkage. I mean, just look at the size difference between the fired and unfired cups. But when everything works just right, the result is absolutely mesmerizing. Watching it print smooth lines of porcelain, slowly building up impossible designs out of essentially pressurized mud never gets old. I love how this project blurs the line between engineering and art, and allows you to create some truly beautiful yet functional pieces. The double walled cup is a favourite of mine, I drink my morning coffee out of it every day, and it really shows off the incredible geometry you can create using additive manufacturing methods. Plus it keeps your hands cool. This rock cup, no I mean this rock climbing cup, was also a fun use case. I suck at modelling organic objects, so I designed this almost entirely with AI, first generating an image, and then turning it into a mesh using an online tool. I mean, it's a bit hit or miss sometimes, but it's really impressive how far this tech has come, and how quickly it's still improving. In retrospect, there are a lot of things I would have done differently with this printer. The moving mass of the x-axis is absolutely huge, especially considering how flimsy this cantilever design is. If it looks familiar, it's because I borrowed it from my 4-axis polar printer for this project. I actually started designing this printer as a ceramic printer two years ago, right after graduating uni, so I could make ceramic tableware for my London apartment. Instead, I threw a polymer extruder on it, and well, got very distracted obviously. After two international moves, this poor thing is held together by superglue and at this point, I'm not even sure where the control board is. Probably somewhere back there. So if anyone is inspired to make their own clay printer, I would highly recommend taking a look at the work of Pior Wazowski and Tom Loriman, both of whom are incredible artists who have done some amazing things with the art form of ceramic 3D printing. The printer is all open source, so the files will be linked below. That's all for now. If you enjoy what I do, make sure to subscribe. I apologize for the infrequent uploads, but I promise I have some really fun stuff in the pipeline, so I'll see you then.