🏷️ Type Group Project
🔧 Machine Clay 3D Printer → CNC Pen Plotter
👥 Team Aisha · Sarah · Hamidah · musaed
🛠 Tools Fusion 360 - RAMPS 1.4 - Marlin FW - PLA 3D Print - Pronterface
📊 Status ✅ Plotter — Complete ⚠️ Clay — Driver blocked
The brief for Machine Week was open: design and build a machine — one that combines mechanism, actuation, automation, and a real application. The team's answer: a clay extrusion 3D printer.
The main challenge remained being a remote student joining the team in Saudi Arabia from Kuwait. additinally becuase of the war in the gulf region and the work responsibilities, one of the Kuwiat team (Musaed Alkout) had to withdraw and move to the next FabLab Cycle.
We held several virtual meetings and stayed connected through a WhatsApp group. We also agreed to review our progress and assess the milestones we could reach every two days. A shared page on Notion was created to allow each member of the team to document and review the different parts of the project as we continued developing it.
The idea started from a simple observation. Sarah (Team member) had a closed-source FDM printer, its X/Y motion system was perfectly functional, but what if we stripped the head and made it push clay instead?
🏺Clay is one of the oldest materials shaped by human hands. Building a machine to extrude it forces you to confront something that FDM printers hide: material resistance. Clay doesn't flow through heat — it flows through pressure. That difference drove every engineering decision of the week.
For the Mechanical part, and after consulting the FabLab instructors at Global Hours, Hamidah chose to contribute by adapting one of my previous projects — the multi-gear / worm-gear assembly . The mechanism converts a single central motor into synchronised Z-axis motion on four corner pillars (so the bed stays level as it rises) plus a separate rotation drive (so the bed can spin 360° clockwise and counter-clockwise).
This image is created using AI to demonstrate the concept we are trying to achieve in this week