Hi guys,

We are a group of 3 french students from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint Etienne, and as part of a school project, our purpose is to adapt one of the two 3d printers we got at school to make it print with beeswax.

The advantages of printing with beeswax are various: it would permit to create prototype molds for metal forging for example. Moreover the kind of plastics used for printing are pretty bad for the environment, whereas beeswax is way cleaner as it is a natural material.


We got a few months (until june) to make the project advance as much as we can, that's why we'd like to introduce it on this forum to show you our improvements and eventually ask you questions.


So let's explain a little bit what we already have, and what we are about to do:
The two 3D printers of the school are a MakerBot Replicator 2X:
makerbot-replicator.jpg

And a Reprap Mendel, made by the school staff, which has a problem of head movement, that we are currently trying to fix:
520px-Mendel.jpg
(our personal pics will come shortly)



We will try to create a total new head, for this our tools are basically :
-The Makerbot printer itself
-All the processing machines of the school lab (CNC,...)

An important part of the goal would be to make this new head manufacturable by everyone who already has a 3dprinter. That is to say, we should not use processing machines, at least for the final version.

The first thing we are doing is to find the good temperature to get the beeswax fluid enough to be printable. For this, we must found how to calculate the viscosity of the melted beeswax at different temperatures. We will use the viscometer the past group of students made and see if it works.

After that, it will be possible to start thinking and designing a new head.


More pictures will come shortly, and we'll update the topic regularly!