50 Fun Facts About 3D Printing

3DBenchy, the torture-test model believed to be the world's most 3D-printed object, depicts what?

A tugboat packs awkward geometry into a tiny model: its curved sides, arched doorways and bridged cabin roof show up a printer's flaws at a glance.

ABS, a tough plastic sold as 3D printer filament, replaced cellulose acetate as the material of which famous toy?

Lego bricks have been moulded from ABS since 1963, with the plastic brought to about 232 °C until it reaches a dough-like consistency.

Stratasys co-founder Scott Crump conceived filament 3D printing while making his daughter a toy frog with which tool?

A glue gun loaded with polyethylene and candle wax let Crump build the frog up in layers, an idea he automated and patented the following year.

Which tool did the International Space Station's 3D printer make in four hours from a design file sent up from Earth?

A ratchet wrench was the only one of the first 20 objects printed in orbit whose design arrived after the printer did. It was built from 104 layers of plastic.

PLA, the most widely used home 3D printing filament, is a bioplastic usually made by fermenting starch from which crop?

Corn is the usual feedstock, though cassava, sugarcane and sugar beet also work, and PLA's low melting point makes it the easiest plastic to print at home.

PVA filament is used to print temporary supports on dual-nozzle 3D printers because it dissolves in which liquid?

Water washes PVA supports out of cavities that no tool could reach, and the same polymer is used in laundry detergent pods.

The replicator, a fictional machine that makes meals and objects on demand like a 3D printer, is from which franchise?

Star Trek did not use the word replicator until The Next Generation, and NASA later funded a real 3D food printer for long spaceflights.

e-NABLE, an open-source network of volunteers with 3D printers, designs and makes which devices mainly for children?

Prosthetic hands from e-NABLE have reached thousands of children, including in 2014 the first child in the UK to be fitted with a 3D-printed one.

What kind of vehicle was Terran 1, the largely 3D-printed machine that a California startup flew once in 2023?

A rocket was the boldest test yet of metal 3D printing: Terran 1 failed to reach orbit, but its printed structure held up under the loads of flight.

Construction-scale 3D printers, used to build houses and a military barracks hut, mainly extrude which material?

Concrete printing is older than it looks: William Urschel of Valparaiso, Indiana, filed a patent in 1941 for a machine that laid walls down one layer at a time.

Milling and drilling, which carve a part out of a solid block, belong to which family of manufacturing methods?

Subtractive manufacturing is a retronym: nobody needed a single word for cutting material away until additive methods arrived and required a contrast.

Which name for filament 3D printing is trademarked by Stratasys, which led open-source makers to adopt a different term?

Fused deposition modeling and its initials FDM belong to Stratasys, so hobbyists coined fused filament fabrication, or FFF, as a name anyone could use freely.

Resin 3D printers build objects by hardening a vat of liquid photopolymer with which kind of radiation?

Ultraviolet curing of layered models was first shown by the Japanese researcher Hideo Kodama in the early 1980s, before any 3D printer had been sold.

Which American inventor coined the word stereolithography and co-founded 3D Systems, the first 3D printing company?

Chuck Hull had the idea in 1983 while hardening tabletop coatings with lamps at work, and he entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Which 3D model file format, released by 3D Systems in 1987, describes only an object's surface as a mesh of triangles?

STL stores no colour, texture or even scale, so the same file can come out in millimetres or inches unless the user says which.

A 3D printer's movement instructions are written in which language, first standardised in the 1960s for CNC machines?

G-code is short for geometric code, and a print file also carries commands beyond movement, such as the temperatures the machine must hold.

What name is given to programs such as Cura that turn a 3D model into flat layers and printer commands?

A slicer first segments the model into a stack of flat layers, then plans the path the print head must trace across each one.

Which print setting, given as a percentage, controls how much structure is printed inside an otherwise hollow part?

Infill lets a part be mostly air: solid prints waste filament and time, so the software hollows them out and adds internal walls for strength.

Which powder-fusing 3D printing process, developed at the University of Texas in the 1980s, needs no support structures?

Selective laser sintering needs no scaffolding because the part stays buried in loose powder as it grows, and its early development was sponsored by DARPA.

In the 1980s, the technology now called 3D printing generally went by which name?

Rapid prototyping cut the time and cost of testing a new design, which had previously meant machining every trial part in a toolroom.

ABS prints can be given a smooth, glossy surface by exposing them to the vapour of which common solvent?

Acetone, the main ingredient of many nail polish removers, softens the outer skin of ABS so that the ridges between layers flow together.

PETG filament is a modified form of PET, the clear plastic best known as the material of which everyday product?

Soda bottles made of PET were invented in 1973 by Nathaniel Wyeth, and PETG swaps in a second glycol to make the plastic easier to form.

TPU filament, which prints best on direct-drive 3D printers, is chosen for parts needing which property?

Flexibility is also TPU's weakness: the soft filament buckles and jams when pushed through a long feed tube, so a motor right above the nozzle suits it.

Which plastic, first sold as toothbrush bristles, is the usual powder in industrial powder-based 3D printers?

Nylon became a sensation when stockings made from it went on sale in 1940, with 64 million pairs sold in the first year.

Standard filament 3D printer nozzles are made of which alloy, which abrasive carbon-fibre filaments quickly wear away?

Brass is fine for soft plastics like PLA, but filaments filled with wood or carbon fibre need a hardened steel nozzle to survive.

Which kind of electric motor, also found in scanners and slot machines, moves the print head on most 3D printers?

A stepper motor turns in small, discrete angular steps, so the controller can count pulses and know the position without any sensor.

Which printer feature keeps a part warm during printing so that ABS shrinks evenly instead of lifting at the corners?

A heated bed stops the bottom of a part cooling faster than the rest, the uneven shrinkage that makes corners curl up off the build platform.

On a typical filament 3D printer, the head or platform takes one step in which direction each time a layer is finished?

The Z axis is the slow one: the head races around in X and Y to draw each layer, then makes one small climb before starting the next.

Which style of 3D printer, used by the Rostock and Kossel designs, moves its print head with three arms?

Delta printers borrow their linkage from the fast pick-and-place factory robots invented in Switzerland in the early 1980s.

Which print defect, nicknamed hairy prints, leaves thin wisps of plastic on a model and is cured by tuning retraction?

Stringing happens when molten plastic oozes out as the nozzle travels across a gap, so retraction pulls the filament back before each move.

Which open-source project, begun at the University of Bath, builds 3D printers that can print most of their own parts?

RepRap's first machine, named Darwin, managed in 2008 to print a complete copy of its own plastic parts, about half of the whole machine.

Which New York maker of the Cupcake CNC and Replicator 3D printers was acquired by Stratasys in 2013?

MakerBot fetched $604 million in Stratasys stock, and its rise is a main thread of the Netflix documentary Print the Legend.

Which website, launched in 2008 by Zach Smith, hosts more than a million free user-shared designs for 3D printing?

Thingiverse began as a companion site to a company selling 3D printer kits, and its designs are shared under open licences such as Creative Commons.

Prusa Research, the maker of the Prusa i3 family of 3D printers, has its headquarters in which European capital?

Prague houses a print farm where rows of the company's own printers turn out the plastic parts for the next machines it sells.

Cura, the free print-preparation program created by David Braam, is maintained by which 3D printer maker?

Ultimaker hired David Braam to keep developing Cura, and left it free for anyone to use, so it works with most other brands of printer too.

Formlabs raised nearly $3 million in 2012 for its Form 1 resin 3D printer on which crowdfunding site?

Kickstarter itself was named in the lawsuit that 3D Systems filed over the campaign, which claimed the Form 1 infringed one of its patents.

Bambu Lab, a 3D printer maker founded in 2020, was started by a team of engineers from which drone company?

DJI's former head of consumer drones, Ye Tao, led the group of engineers who left to start the printer company.

Creality, the maker of the Ender 3 series of 3D printers, has its headquarters in which Chinese technology hub?

Shenzhen is also home to Bambu Lab, so two of the best-known consumer 3D printer brands share a single city.

Which university's researchers trademarked the name Three-Dimensional Printing for a powder process patented in 1993?

MIT's process stuck powder together with a liquid binder, and its name was later stretched to cover every kind of additive machine.

Which free browser-based tool from Autodesk lets beginners build 3D models by combining simple solids and holes?

Tinkercad was started by a former Google engineer, Kai Backman, and it can even export a design into Minecraft.

Defense Distributed released files in 2013 for which single-shot pistol, the first widely shared 3D-printable firearm?

Liberator plans were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days before the US State Department demanded that they be taken offline.

Which medical device's custom shell is typically modelled from a mould of the wearer's body and then 3D printed?

A hearing aid sits comfortably because its shell is modelled digitally from a mould of the wearer's own ear canal before it is printed.

Local Motors spent 44 hours at a 2014 Chicago trade show 3D printing the body of which electric car?

Strati's print was followed by three days of milling and assembly before the finished car took its first test drive.

In Cura, which adhesion option prints extra lines of filament around a model's base, touching it but not underneath it?

Brim lines widen a part's footprint so its edges stay stuck down, whereas a skirt circles the model without ever touching it.

OctoPrint, a web interface for controlling a 3D printer remotely, is most commonly run on which small computer?

Raspberry Pi owners can install a ready-made system image called OctoPi, which also streams a webcam view of the print in progress.

Which open-source 3D printer firmware was created in 2011 by combining elements of the Grbl and Sprinter projects?

Marlin runs on the small controller boards inside printers from LulzBot, Prusa Research and Creality, and is written in C++ for Arduino hardware.

Among the seven ISO/ASTM categories of additive manufacturing, ordinary filament 3D printers fall under which one?

Material extrusion sits beside six other families in the standard, among them vat photopolymerization for resin machines and binder jetting for powder.

Modelled on the word pixel, what name is given to each tiny cube of a 3D object that a multi-material printer fills?

Voxel printing means choosing a material for every tiny cube of an object, the same building block seen in the blocky worlds of Minecraft.

Which extruder layout, named after a bicycle brake cable's inventor, pushes filament to the hot end through a long tube?

Bowden setups keep the heavy motor off the moving print head, so the lighter head can travel faster with less vibration.

The low-friction tube that guides filament to a 3D printer's hot end is made of PTFE, better known by which brand name?

Teflon is chosen because so little sticks to it: the filament has to slide the whole length of the tube each time the motor pushes or pulls.