Mazzzzive
Mazzzzive V1
I need to be clear. Mazzzzive was first and foremost a joke. It was a very committed joke. People take 3D printing and RepRap so seriously and forget that at the end of the day most of us just printing plastic do-dads that will end up, who knows where. The Idea of a 8’ tall 300x300mm build area printer made from plywood and threaded rods for the z with a drilled out 2mm nozzle for extrusion was just a way to generate conversation and try to convince everyone to have a good time and not take everything so seriously.
It worked. I had 19 days from clicking file New to having to have the thing working to show off to the world. On Day 18 an incredibly sleep deprived Joe sat on the floor and worked on wire terminations while members of RCL painted the big wooden box green around me. On Day 19 we threw it in the back of a U-haul and I finished the machine on day 20 at the show. At 11:50PM on Day 20 I hit print on the first print and then negotiated 15 more minutes to make sure the first layer went down ok and walked away to hope we wouldn’t come back to some oddly shaped pile of spaghetti. The next morning we came in as early as possible to find a mostly finished super tall space plane and a 6 pound roll of filament that only had 2 wraps of filament left on it. After a bit a of scramble we got the roll swapped and we finished out the print a couple hours later. 7.5’ tall 14ish hours to print.
Machining the Z Plates on my router:
Mazzzzive V2
The machine was never supposed to last past that year at MRRF but it was a fun project and still had so many possibilities, but my only real interest was making the machine work at MRRF. So the next year I engineered a new hotend, tripling the melt zone, stiffened the gantry so it would travel better, and changed the Z axis to a belt drive from the threaded rods so that homing the machine didn’t take 10 minutes.
This time I did have the time to test the tool head on a smaller printer to tune in the extrusion settings.
The machine didn’t work so well at its second show. I lost steps on one of the Z motors and it literally tore itself apart. Sad day. But Mazzzzive will live on…
