Student creates 3D extruder using hot glue gun and LEGO

What do you do if your research project calls for equipment that you don't have access to or can't afford on your own? Well, you can either beg your school for it, weep to your professor about the difficulty of the project or just wing it and make your own. Whatever muse took hold of Vimal Patel, it must have been a pretty strong one. In the absence of a 3Doodler-like machine, he decided to make his own contraption using some creativity, imagination, and LEGO.

To be clear, Patel's project requirement didn't really ask him to build such a thing. The real goals was to find a use for biodegradable 3D printer filaments. That eventually led him to look into, of course, 3D printers but was left unimpressed by the layer-based production process of common Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM-based printers. He was more interested in the multi-axis possibilities of free-form equipment like 3Doodler but didn't have access to even that commercial product.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and invent he did. He assembled LEGO parts in order to create an attachment that would feed the filament material into a hot glue gun, while the latter served to head up and deposit the filament as needed. The result? A makeshift, DIY, cheap 3Doodler alternative.

Patel's achievement, as far as ingenuity and resourcefulness goes, is definitely notable. Somewhat ironically, his actually project, which was a bicycle helmet made from such materials, was actually less attractive. Hopefully he at least got a good mark for the glue gun.

VIA: Hackaday