April Presentation - Spectacular 3D Printing

April is REAST 3D Printing and Amateur Radio Month.

Praj VK4MPB/7MPB has been building 3D printers since 2011, back when you didn’t “print a file,” you nervously injected raw G-code into what was essentially a heated toaster that had ambitions of becoming a Replicator. Slicers were cryptic and confrontational bits of software, firmware updates required emotional resilience, and bed levelling was practically a sacred ritual involving tiny hex keys, deep breathing, and intense philosophical debates about 0.2 millimetres of Z-offset. A good first layer wasn’t expected, it was negotiated - sometimes aggressively.

My printers still live in the garage, where they’ve evolved from temperamental science experiments that occasionally produced abstract art - or spectacular nests of plastic spaghetti - into surprisingly competent little manufacturing units. While I was chasing the mythical perfect first layer (and cleaning lumps of molten filament off nozzles), additive manufacturing quietly matured. The same core principles behind those early DIY machines now produce surgical implants with bone-growth lattices, aerospace components with internal cooling channels that can’t be machined, advanced engineering parts and some spectacular art - all in a mind boggling array of materials.

And yes, it turns out the same technology responsible for heroic prints and catastrophic spaghetti is also brilliant for us radio amateurs. From portable HF and SOTA/POTA gear, to clever shack fixes, to RF experiments that genuinely move a NanoVNA trace in ways that only makes me more curious, 3D printing has become a real engineering tool.

Praj will be sharing some of the practical, creative and genuinely cool things you can do with it today - in everyday life, in serious engineering, and in amateur radio - along with a few demonstrations to prove it’s not just enthusiasm for melting plastic.

Expect nostalgia, curiosity, a bit of garage-born instability… and the unshakeable belief that if I just level the print bed one more time, this time it’ll absolutely be perfect. Truth!

When: 8th April 2026 from 7:30pm in the clubroom and streamed

See you there

REAST Committee