[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]

August 30th, 2020-

Hello, dear Patrons! This month I made some really major progress on the new version of the Trash Printer, that I started prototyping back in April. I've completely re-designed the gantry so that it uses 100% open source parts, and optimized it for 2D cutting rather than 3D printing, so that the parts can be laser-cut out of wood or acrylic in a fraction of the time it took to print the old parts.

Whereas the old Trash Printer gantry took around 70 hours of 3D printing to make a full kit, the parts for this new design can be manufactured by a laser cutter in about an hour. 

The parts can be cut out of a wide range of materials, using a wide range of tools, depending on what you have available. I'm prototyping the parts with 1/4" plywood, which ends up being remarkably rigid and cheap. All of the parts can be cut out of about $30 worth of hobby plywood. 

The design is still a work in progress, but things translated from my Sketchup design to real life way more smoothly than I expected, and I was able to mount the motors, control board, and lead screws, and get the whole thing moving. I haven't gotten a chance to print anything yet, but once I wire a up a few cables I'll be ready to give it a shot!

Speaking of getting things printing for the first time, my friends over at the Trash Hackers Collective recently got their own replication of the Trash Printer up and running, and printed out these little vases as their first test prints! This is the first independent replication of the Trash Printer design, and it's exciting to see the idea finally spread beyond my basement! Replication is the highest form of flattery.

Prototyping wooden parts for the Trash Printer generates a fair amount of waste. Each iteration creates a set of obsolete parts and lots of small bits of scrap. I realized that I could feed this waste biomass to the Biochar Reactor and turn it into charcoal and energy! So I've been using the scraps and old parts to test the new reactor. A full batch takes about 3 hours to fire, and consumes about 2-4kwh of electrical power.

I've got the reactor setup fully mounted to one of the LOVE trikes, so it can be moved as needed. Each part of this project is creeping closer to being able to function as part of a whole system, which can travel around the city, generating energy from waste biomass, and using that energy to shred and 3D print waste plastic into new stuff, like a living trash-eating meta-organism!

Thank you as always for your support in this crazy endeavor!

Onward!

Sam