3D MagicFrom old plastic to a bird on your shelf
A 3D printer doesn’t carve or mould. It builds the bird up from nothing, one thin layer of melted plastic at a time. Here’s the whole process.
The filament is recycled plastic
Filament is the thread a 3D printer eats, wound on a spool like fishing line. Ours is made from plastic that has already had a first life, collected, cleaned, ground into flakes, melted and drawn out into a thread again.
It prints just like new filament. The difference is what it was before, and what it would have been otherwise.
Which recycled filament, and how much of it is recycled content, is the maker’s choice and changes with what’s available. No percentage is claimed here.
Printed layer by layer
The printer heats the thread until it flows, then draws the bottom slice of the bird onto the bed. Then the next slice on top of that. Then the next. Each layer is a fraction of a millimetre thick, and a bird is made of hundreds of them, so a single print takes hours.
The layer lines stay
Look closely at a finished bird and you’ll see fine horizontal lines running round its body. Those are the layers. Some people sand them away. We don’t, because they are the honest mark of how the bird was made: one at a time, on a printer.
Once the print is cool, the small supports that held up a beak or a tail are snipped off and the edges tidied by hand. Then it’s ready.