Shaping 3D

Team Visual Solutions in Dubai builds large-scale retail installations for brands like Jack Daniels and needed a way to fabricate custom fibreglass-class pieces in-house, at printer-sized scale, without the handcraft labour. They wanted two machines — a tall printer and a broad multi-gantry printer. I co-founded Shaping 3D to build them. I did the design, the mechanical engineering, the electronics, the firmware, the control software, and the ops. A small team of recent CS grads helped on execution once the designs existed.

The tall printer: A 1.5 × 1.5 × 4 m print envelope on a flying-frame gantry with tilting X and Y, fed by a pellet extruder I customised heavily from a Massive Dimension base unit. The feeding system is the part that separates “a prototype” from “a machine that runs”: pellets drop from a sealed hopper into a blower-driven feed line that pushes material up and along elastic tubing only when the extruder calls for it, minimising moisture exposure and feed lag. All axis motion is AC servo on closed-loop control. Z is lifted by four independently-drivable chain-and-sprocket columns with auto-levelling; the gantry tilts are electronically compensated. The extruder runs on CAN — a single two-wire bus carries all control for the extrusion motor, the heaters, thermocouples, and end stops, so the gantry has a trivial cable carry. The broad printer: 2 m tall, 3 m wide, 6 m long — but with three independently-driven gantries sharing the Y axis. The client can print one massive object across the full 6 m bed, or two mid-size objects split down the middle, or three smaller objects in parallel. Each gantry has its own extruder and its own lifting columns; the base rack-and-pinion Y axis is shared. Gantry-to-gantry isolation logic lives in firmware and prevents collisions during parallel jobs.

The extruder I’m most proud of: For the second and third gantries I designed the extruder from scratch rather than adapting an existing one. Rated output is 12 kg/h, carbon-steel screw, four thermal zones, 750 W ceramic heater per zone, and a breaker plate to damp the surge/drool during accel/decel. The whole barrel-and-screw assembly is hand-swappable in under three minutes — four screws, a lifting handle, and the material-colour change that used to take a shift now takes a coffee break. All electronics live on the extruder itself; connection to the gantry is power plus a single CAN pair. What I built end to end: Mechanical CAD, the electronics (including the custom controller PCBs), the firmware, the G-code slicing workflow, the control platform (print jobs, material tracking, multi-tenant access), the deployment workflow. Both machine classes were shipped to the client’s Dubai facility, installed, and used in production for a year-plus. The company is now discontinued.