It was a good year for April Fools pranks in the 3D printing world: from food prep to Fast and Furious-worthy N2O upgrades for your printer and more, kick back and have another chuckle at all the 3D printing gags we could find.

The beginning of April brings out the silly in folks, with companies marketing teams spinning up imaginative ways to make us snort over our cereal, its a veritable playground of make-believe products that we sometimes wish were real.

In case you slept through that morning, here’s what you missed:

MatterHackers ReSpool 3D Un-Printer

File this one under things we wish were real. On a frame that looks suspiciously like the company’s Pulse 3D printer, MatterHackers‘ ReSpool takes an unloved or failed print and “reverses the printed part”, respooling the printed filament back onto the roll. The bed heats to 400 degrees Celsius, and is “too good to be true (pauses for effect)”… Hmm.

BMW Motorrad iParts

German automobile maker BMW takes the concept of localized micro factories to the limit with its iParts concept. In effect a M3D Micro, strapped to the back of the company’s range of motorbikes, the iParts system promises the on-the-go SLS manufacture of large and complex parts from metal and plastic, even going so far as to produce replacement mirrors and other glass parts.

Printed Solid Pro Invisible Filament

Printing completely transparent parts using FDM 3D printers is something of an art form, and even then the results are never quite glass-like in appearance. Thankfully PrintedSolid is on hand with its new solution: Printed Solid Pro Invisible Filament. You’d be forgiven for thinking the company is shipping you an empty spool, but with recommended print settings ranging from 0 – 450 degrees Celsius and at speeds of 5 – 5,000mm/s, you know you’re looking at a precisely engineered product.

Formlabs Game Kit

With the announcement of a shift in focus, Formlabs unveiled its Game Kit for the Form 2, Wash and Cure products. A print-it-yourself games controller that, once properly post-processed and cured, plus directly into the Form Wash transforming it into a 2-bit games console. Better still, a VR headset upgrade allows players to get up close to the action (by leaning in and placing their head against the machine).

Formlabs’ April Fools effort might be one of the more absurd gags on this list, but there’s a real Easter Egg behind it all. Users of the Form Wash can actually unlock a Super Breakout-style block breaking game. Here’s how:

• From the main menu, move the selection tool to the bottom (“Open”), then to the top (“Start”) to reset the combination lock.
• Dial the knob three ticks clockwise, six ticks counterclockwise, seven clockwise, and six counterclockwise.
• Start playing!

E3D Medusa

 

Following the recent announcement of its wild tool-changing 3D printing motion system at the Midwest RepRap Festival, E3D topped even itself with the Medusa. Boasting four different heater blocks with four different nozzles, a-la heads on the mythical Medusa, this bed-leveling nightmare of a printer part is just crazy enough for us to think E3D might give it a shot sometime. Or not.

Sculpteo: 3D Printing in Newly Discovered Mayan Codex

Printing bureau Sculpteo broke some tantalising news on April 1st with the discovery of a codex detailing 3D printing technology in ancient Maya civilization. An archaeologist by the name of Polly Amide explains the discovery as such “One thing is now sure: these new codices are the proof that they knew how to use a 3D printer! We are still analyzing these new elements, to get a better understanding of their use of 3D. We are pretty sure that they also invented some G-Code to use their 3D printers“.

colorFabb: Project Icarus Drone Deliveries

Taking a leaf out of Amazon and Domino’s playbook, colorFabb announced the introduction of its drone filament delivery service. An offering under a new joint venture with DHL and Universal Exports called Drones Unlimited Holland (or DUH), the service has been in development for over a year under the codename Icarus. Carrying 8 spools of filament at a time, the drones whisk their wares to customers within hours of order, colorFabb claims.

Original Prusa i3 Mk3 Master Chef Upgrade

Working hard to make sure the Mk3 is the one machine to rule your life, the folks over at Original Prusa took to the internet on April 1st to reveal their latest upgrade kit for the Original Prusa i3 Mk 3: the Master Chef Upgrade — a suite of kitchen preparation tools to get your Mk3 whipping up tasty treats during its downtime. Including a dough roller, soup stirrer, egg scrambler and tea dunker, it’s a precision engineered open source breakfast machine. Joke or not, since this is Prusa the files to actually print your own are freely available (here).

Monoprice SuperSpeed N2O Kit

Adding some street racer vibes to its lineup of 3D printers, Monoprice’s SuperSpeed N2O Kit uses Nitrous Oxide to push print speeds to “at least 100x”. Boasting plug and play simplicity via a USB connection, this 3D printer upgrade consists of simply a N2O tank and a big red switch. We’ll take ten.

3D Hubs: Banana For Scale

Capitalizing on the Internet’s most beloved unit of measurement, 3D Hubs announced the humble banana as the latest addition to its print process. Now when checking out your models for manufacturing you can get a tangible approximation of its real world size, simply click the banana in the viewport, and a banana — true to scale against your model — drops in alongside.

Olsson Ruby All-Ruby

 

Getting in on the fun, Olsson Ruby made its mark on April Fools day with possibly the most precious thing on this list: the All-Ruby. A single solid piece of ruby, the nozzle looks the business, but we fear would take an eternity to get to temperature.