Printable extruder and now printable dinos!  I had tried my hand at printable dinos, but I’m not in Zaggo’s league.  While my designs were for printable dinos that could be as a single piece each, his are clearly more elegant and use much less plastic.

What’s interesting about the differences between our designs is that mine were based on trying to replicate the existing dinos in a printable manner.  However, the dinos themselves were designed based upon the constraints of having to design three dimensional parts by layering and fitting lasercut acrylic pieces.  The question I completely failed to answer, and which Zaggo addressed perfectly, is “How would you redesign this object if you only had to be concerned with the constraints of a MakerBot, not a laser cutter?”

If you aren’t constrained by having to assemble lasercut parts, why not print them in such a way that it uses less plastic?  Why not print them on their sides?  Even with a non-heated platform it should be trivial to get the bottom of these dinos flat.  If anything warps it will be the parts that hold up the extruder.  And even then the warp would only serve to keep a tight fit on the extruder by squeezing it together.

If you examine a plastruder you can see the filament and heater assembly are not perfectly centered within the unit.  My guess is that’s  why there are two dinos – one which reaches towards the center.  However, there’s no reason a printruder couldn’t be designed so that the heater assembly was in the middle of the printruder.  If this were the case you could just print up two sets of printable dinos – instead of a left/right or big/weird combo.  Zaggo’s design allows for supporting either a printruder or a layered lasercut acrylic plastruder.

And we’re one step closer to a printable MakerBot!