Pasta
APRIL FOOLS
We’ve seen many 3D printing foods in our time here at Personalize, there was the Pancake bot, BurritoBot and of course, lest we forget, Fab Café’s Chocolate Faces and Gummy Men. All of them work on the same basic principle as 3D printing; the substance is melted through the extruder and cools into solid.
This got us to thinking, ‘what else could you 3D print with? What about Spaghetti?’ Spaghetti shares many of the same properties as the filament you find in regular 3D printing filament. The point at which pasta softens is 180 degrees, the nozzle of the 3D printer we have have at Personalize reaches 250 degrees, so logically speaking it must be possible, though perhaps not wise, to force spaghetti through the filament feed.
So with a little modding, with the help of Repetier software we managed to set the temp of the nozzle to 180 degrees and leave the build plate cooler so the pasta could solidy. We olive oiled (yes olive oil) the build platform because we want to eat this stuff, what’s the point otherwise? We then, attempted to feed raw spaghetti through the filament feed of our PP3D printer, UP! Plus. Naturally those first attempts failed and clogged up our nozzle, it was a problem of diameter. Raw Spaghetti has a diameter of between 1.5 and 2mm, the ABS filament that is usually used on our UP! Is 3mm.
But we weren’t giving up there, it seemed to work in principle but the consistency was dreadful when coming out the nozzle. ‘Was there a thicker spaghetti?’ We wondered, something in between spaghetti and Udon noodles (the thicker worm like ones) perhaps? Fortunately our resident Italian, Rosa, had the answer. Porafillo! Porafillo is a little known pasta from northern Italy, created in a Pizzeria in Sirmione for the chef’s very picky offspring who didn’t like how thin Spaghetti was or how flat Tagliatelle was. Porafillo roughly translates to ‘for my son’ and is very popular with the children of Lake Garda. More importantly, Porafillo is exactly 3mm in diameter and is made from a stronger flour than usual pasta meaning it would soften at a higher temp and cool faster.
After some playing about with the settings, we found porafillo printed like an absolute dream, it made models pretty much exactly the same as ABS with the exact same settings (0.2mm layer resolution in case you're wondering). The results blew us all away, with a passata sauce and some grated Parmesan the Porafillo 3D printed, dolphin faced bird tasted sensational.
PERSONALIZE HAVE CREATED THE WORLD’S FIRST PASTA 3D PRINTED MODEL WITH PORAFILLO PASTA!
