LEGO building blocks are a great toy, but every so often a hacker decides to take the little bricks outside of the toy room and make them an integral part of a build. [Adam Turaj] took that idea further than most with his Studprint, a 3D printer that’s 92% LEGO.
We aren’t just talking LEGO bricks making up part of the frame here, or even the bed — though that’s obviously the case — but [Adam] goes so far that even the motion system is using LEGO leadscrews to drive the axes of this printer. Is it particularly capable? Well, no. He’s not boasting of a remarkable bed size or high speeds here because that’s really not the point. The point is that he made a printer in LEGO and if you don’t see the fun in that, we don’t know what to tell you.
The whole project is open source, and includes the CAD files for the handful of non-LEGO bits you’ll need to mount the electronics, steppers and such. With an unheated bed of ABS bricks, you’re going to be limited in filament choices, but [Adam] has at least made a Benchy, which is all anyone really needs, right?
In light of recent work, we can might suggest that the printer is also a pick-and-place machine. If you want to turn the phrase “LEGO 3D Printer” around, we have seen 3D Printed LEGO before as well. We’d be remiss not to note that this isn’t the first printer to use the ubiquitous building blocks we’ve seen, though this one keeps with the regular filament and extruder rather than hot glue like the 2013 version.