3D printers are cool for printing miniature Yoda heads, tiny owls, and little tea cups. But what about printing something really useful, like, say, a stainless steel rocket engine?
Check out this project from Rocket Moonlighting. Says Hack-a-Day:
Most any rocket engine you’d find on a spacecraft – save for solid or hybrid rockets – use an engine system that’s fairly complex. Because of the intense heat, the fuel is circulated around the chamber before ignition giving a motor its regeneratively cooled nomenclature. This arrangement leads to a few complicated welding and machining processes, but surprisingly these obstacles can be overcome by simply printing a rocket engine on a 3D printer.
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[…] 3D Printing a Rocket Engine 3D printers are cool for printing miniature Yoda heads, tiny owls and little tea cups. But what about printing something really useful, like, say, a stainless steel rocket engine? Check out this pr…… […]
The Pingback I see is actually from Chris George, who doesn’t seem to be aware of the long-running subthread of amateur rocketeers in the Maker community – whence the interest in the low cost.
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[…] These machines use polar coordinates. This system is similar to the Cartesian except that the coordinate sets describe points on a circular grid rather than a square. Yes, with a little rocket science, we can have a printer with a spinning bed and a print head that moves up, down, left and right. No need for forward and backward movement! On a side note, did you know that you can make a rocket engine with any of these printers? […]