Tag Archives: color blending

Top 3D Printing Headlines Last Week: iPhones, Fab Labs, Brazil, Manhattan

Foxconn iPhone 3D Printing

A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from September 24 to September 28.

Monday, September 24
Tuesday, September 25

Color Blending with Consumer 3D Printers Produces Amazing Results

RichRap iPhone Cases 3D Printing

Consumer 3D printers, like MakerBot and the Cube, cost over $1,300 and can only print in one or two colors. If you want multi-color printing, you need to use a commercial grade 3D printer that costs $20,000 or more.

Well, electrical engineer and hobbyist Richard Home, decided to branch out and design his own method of “color blending”, a technique that turns a basic 3D printer into something much more capable. He started with the open-source RepRap design and developed his own extruder design, which he coined “RichRap.”

RichRap Color Blending 3D Printing

As featured in Wired:

Here’s how it works: The RichRap has three extruder motors feeding into one nozzle, or hot end. Each motor spools plastic filament into the hot end where it is melted, then deposited on a build surface. An operator could load a RichRap with red, yellow, and blue plastics and generate green parts by mixing the yellow and blue, or purple by mixing red and blue.

RichRap Color Blending Frog 3D Printing

Watch the videos below to see Richard discuss his design and show off some of his color prints.