3D Printing

Multicolour 3D printing has always come with a messy compromise – wasted filament. Creality's new K3 promises to change that with four interchangeable nozzles, faster printing and considerably less plastic poop in the bin.

LightMake’s L4 Kickstarter desktop 3D printer pairs four independent toolheads with beltless linear motors, promising faster batch printing, near-zero purge waste, 16-color expansion, and speeds of up to 500 mm/s.

ShiftLens products use optomechanical shifting to change color and pattern. Requiring neither electronics nor a power source, they're more resilient against getting soaked or being dropped than any device needing electricity or a monitor.

If you’ve ever tried 3D-printing anything, you know just how flimsy the results can be. In fact, simply removing them from the build plate can make you sweat, since at any moment the beautiful statuette, replacement part for your refrigerator, or gift for someone special that took 10 hours to print can shatter into a pile of PLA garbage.

HeyGears' upcoming 3D printer can produce full-color models right on your desktop. That means you don't have to worry about painting and finishing your creations by hand – and you can experiment more freely with your designs than ever before.

3D printing is already widely used in medicine for implants, dental crowns, hearing aids, and more. Now, researchers have found a way to 3D print personalized contact lenses that could transform the lives of people who struggle to find a proper fit.

Human and mechanical error during design and printing leads to financially and ecologically expensive waste of 3D printing material. Yokohama University’s new method uses photodimerization to create meltable, reprintable tar-based resin.

Origami, the Japanese art of folding flat sheets of paper into three-dimensional figures, is the creative spark behind a new hybrid 3D printing technique. It allows structures to be created without molds, which fold into shape once printed.

There are all kinds of critical infrastructure lying underwater – road and rail tunnels, pipelines for oil and gas, dams, and more. Could we simply 3D print such projects beneath the surface of the ocean? Cornell University is about to find out.

In order to 3D-print really intricate items, you need a really fine print nozzle. Scientists have discovered that instead of going to the time and trouble of building one, you can simply repurpose a mosquito's existing blood-sucking proboscis.

The FibreSeeker 3 uses a dual-extruder system that works with continuous fibers and comes with the necessary slicing software to make and print parts that are way stronger than conventional desktop 3D printers' results, at a fraction of the price.

If you find 3D printers to be just a little too coldly futuristic, this contraption might be more to your liking. Scientists from Cornell University have created a machine that knits solid 3D objects out of nice old-timey conventional yarn.

If an object that's composed of two types of material is going to fail, the break will usually occur at the interface where the two meet. A new type of light-activated 3D printing resin addresses that problem, by gradually morphing from hard to soft states within a single object.

While 3D printing is a burgeoning technology, it's limited by the fact that items can only be printed from a single material. A new system still uses just one print resin, but that substance can form into two different solid materials as needed.

Bambu Lab's latest flagship 3D printer does a whole lot more than 3D printing for makers, and promises to be good at every one of its tasks. It can handle laser cutting and engraving, drawing, and printing with two materials at once.