This is the story of Tiny, a custom Morgan 3d printer that was commissioned by Makkinktech, an agricultural engineering innovation company. It has a 1 x 1 x 0.5 m build size for the prototype development of a revolutionary low impact implement that promises to improve grain production costs dramatically.
It all started a couple of months ago in the small Morgan workshop at House4hack in Centurion.
We scaled everything up, and realized that just scaling it wouldn’t cut the mustard… At that time we made the arms of the Morgan machines out of Plexiglass in order to capitalize on the fast speeds of our laser cutter. It proved much too heavy and too flexible for any hope of reliable printing. It became necessary to dust off an old idea from the Lillian concept drawings. Tubular carbon fibre arms.
This was the start of a line of R&D that brought you the Morgan2 product line. We replaced printing with polyurethane cast components that improved production speed with the same technical qualities as injection molded ABS. Needless to say, printing quality increased and reliability improved. Win-win all round.
Delivery day Saturday 15 August went without too much problems. Because of the unique frame construction the custom with its 1m squared printing platform fits through a standard door without disassembly. The bed clips off and away you go.
We hope our tiny custom has a wonderful time in it’s new home at the mechanical workshops of the Northwest University in Potchefstroom.
