Founded by Andrew McCalip and Jason Miller, a former SpaceX engineer and a hedge fund quant/physicist, respectively, Cosine is busy ramping up production and meeting with potential clients for their AdditiveMachine1. In fact, the company recently had one meeting in which they printed something very special, at least if you are a Coca Cola fan.
When you try and imagine things you’d like to print on a large-scale FFF 3D printer, it’s usually not a giant Coca Cola bottle, but that’s exactly what the team at Cosine Additive did for one client. This wasn’t just a large Coke bottle, but one which, if they could fill with the famous beverage would hold a staggering 1,000 ounces.
“We printed this piece as a demo of our large scale high throughput 3d printer,” Andrew McCalip, Founder of Cosine Additive Manufacturing Systems told 3DPrint.com. “One of our potential customers was having an event that was related to Coca-Cola, and I happened to be drinking one at the time. I went to GrabCad and found a beautiful model and had it printing on the machine in less than an hour.”
Each bottle, which were printed using 2.5kg of PLA (about two and a half typical-sized spools of filament), took approximately 17 hours to print in full, using a 1mm diameter print nozzle.
“Our machine was designed for engineering grade thermoplastics, but we still use it to print normal materials such as PLA on a regular basis,” explained McCalip. “The machines unique patent-pending architecture solves many of the common problems such as Z banding normally associated with large Cartesian printers. The printer has built in webcams and custom built dashboard software that monitors and timelapses prints. We use the highest quality components such as closed loop brushless servos, ballscrews, and precision laser cut steel. It was our goal to fundamentally advance filament based printing technology by making printing an order of magnitude larger and faster. We’re committed to open source materials and software, we believe that is the future of additive manufacturing.”
As you can see from the images, the company printed out several of these bottles, all which display quite high quality and a lack of noticeable layering (layer resolutions can be between 0.1mm-1mm). For those interested in 3D printing out their very own 1,000-ounce Coca Cola bottle, or perhaps something more useful like a kayak or a furniture piece, the company has already begun taking orders for this machine.
Let’s hear your thoughts on this rather interesting 3D print. Discuss in the 3D Printed 1,000 ounce Coca Cola bottle forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out the time lapse of one of these bottles printing below:
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