Now We Can 3D Print Stuff Without Computers or Electricity

3D printers easily fulfill retrofuturistic visions of how 21st century manufacturing should look. They communicate with computers, they’re largely automated, and they have wires and buttons and other trademark gadgety stuff.

But one designer wants to get away from those kind of smart parts. Daniel de Bruin, a student at the University of the Arts in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has built his own version of a 3D printer, and it’s entirely analog (h/t 3ders for bringing De Bruin’s work to my attention). No computers, no wires, and no power source other than his own physical actions.

It’s not out of Ludditism but out of ideas around artistic ownership. De Bruin told me over the phone that he’d been working with 3D printers—the regular, digital kind—a lot lately and was fascinated by the technology and the techniques. But after a while, he began to feel the machine was doing too much of the work. “The thing I noticed was that the prints that came out of it didn’t feel mine, they were like a product of the machine,” he said. “So I decided to make a machine that creates objects where the machine is made by me and powered by me, so I still have a connection with the products that come out of it.”

Aside from the sprockets, gears and chains, he made the machine parts himself, largely out of low-cost materials. The result looks like the kind of contraption you might imagine designing as a kid to make you breakfast in bed; it’s pleasingly industrial with a bunch of cogs and screws and a ratchety noise as things whizz and spin. De Bruin said he wanted it to be purely functional, and didn’t so much design it as just build it as it came to him.

The basic principle is simple: a syringe extrudes filament (or in this case, fast-drying clay) onto a rotating plate, drawing circles. The plate moves down as it spins, so you end up with a cylinder.

To adjust the shape—which has to be circular but can vary in circumference and height—you bend a little aluminium wire that is connected to the syringe. A bulge in the wire will push the syringe further out on the platform, resulting in a larger circle, and causing a ridge in the finished design.

The whole thing is powered by the user, but with minimal effort. To start it up, De Bruin just has to lift a weight and it kicks into action. “The beautiful thing about it is the moment I lift the weight, my energy is coming through it and the machine kind of takes over,” said De Bruin. “But on the other hand, the machine releases all of my energy into the product.” He has a physical, hands-on role in the making process, but still benefits from the sit-back-and-watch appeal of 3D printing.

He’s made several vase-like objects with it. They’re not as polished as conventional 3D-printed models, but that is of course the point. The clinical precision of regular 3D printing is great for more scientific applications, like bioprinting modified human organs or replacing bits of spacecraft, but De Bruin’s contraption retains the rustic charm of the home-made. As he writes on his blog, “deviations are usually the most interesting."

De Bruin told me he’d recently been experimenting with colours, and intends to modify the printer so it can make larger prints. After that, he’s thinking about creating a desktop version with a spring-loaded mechanism rather than the weight apparatus. “Maybe an open-source, do-it-yourself kind of thing, that would be great,” he said. “I really love to see other people being inspired with this old-new technology, combined.”