BigMuddy
Nobody asked for a printer that prints in mud. The frame went up on the dining table in October 2021, and three weeks later it was stacking clay, one wobbly coil at a time: a box, a pot, a bowl. Every layer shows. That is the charm.
Can a printer get along with something as stubborn as clay?
Plastic melts and behaves. Clay sags, cracks, dries out and traps air. Getting a machine to work with it meant rethinking the whole thing, starting with how to push wet clay slip through a nozzle.
BigMuddy is a delta printer of Charles’s own design. The head hangs from six arms and moves by pulling all of them at once, which keeps it light and quick over a round bed.
Instead of a spool of plastic, it feeds on clay slip from a cartridge built from plumbing-aisle parts. The slip goes in by hand, air pressure pushes it down the hose to the print head, and a screw inside the head meters it out through the nozzle, one coil at a time. Any air that gets in shows up in the print.
The first layers were messy, and exactly what we wanted to see. By day two it was making boxes, pots and bowls that held their shape.
Role: Design, build, code
How it came together.
Nobody asked for it. That is usually where the good stuff is.
The best tricks we bring to client work come from projects like this one: no brief, no deadline, and nothing to lose but a bag of clay.
