I am nervous 3 2 1 oh my God oh my God this is the Magis Spong chair it's the most fun I've ever had on a piece of furniture and it costs about $11,000 when I saw one of these for the first time I immediately thought it was 3D printed it just has that look you can almost imagine one of these chairs printing in a single piece I later learned that they're not 3D printed they're made with a technique called rotational molding but it got me thinking could I 3D print one of these designer chairs
for under $11,000 if I was actually going to 3D print a lifesize working Magis Spong chair I was going to need some help hold your horse oh hi hey do you have a giant 3D printer I can use I do it's complicated let let me show you this is jol telling you might know him from his YouTube channel the 3D printing nerd and he happens to have one of the biggest 3D printers you can buy but it was having some problems so here it is this is the orange storm Giga and originally on a live
stream famously it Dove the nozzle into the bed and destroyed itself and I had to wait for them to send a new hot end because it had bent the screws and actually snapped the heat brake and they did uh I took the 2 hours it takes to level this thing properly L and then I did some prints and it actually worked and then unfortunately because the beds are on Springs and the sensor they're using to get the height isn't proper I printed this and it's got a substantial layer shift and it didn't stick to the
bed very well in the center and then I had this giant glob of filament consume the hot end and break the thermister and this is where it sits so maybe not the best machine to print a meter cubed chair right now not yet I think with the changes that I have planned for this thing it's going to be amazing and can print all the chairs you've ever wanted but for now unfortunately this is offline unfortunately we were just passing through Joel's neck of the woods so I couldn't wait around for the orang storm Giga to
be operational which was probably a blessing in disguise because even though it's big the Giga isn't quite big enough to print a full-size magic Spong chair I'd have to scale it down by like 20% and that feels like a bit of a [Music] copout so as we continue driving north I kept posting in local 3D printing groups trying to find someone with a giant 3D printer that I could use I was hoping that some mad scientist character would come out of the woodwork who had DIY something crazy in their garage but after weeks of posting
and waiting I still had no leads until I had an idea yes I'm recording this in a blanket for it a few weeks prior I got an email from Gabe B Gabe runs slant 3D a mass production 3D printing facility as well as a YouTube channel all about large-scale 3D printing he reached out because he wanted to do a collaboration maybe something where I design a product and they produce it but I was more interested in using his services for something a little crazier you were interested I was interested this was my idea okay for
the record this was Eden's idea thank you yeah so I'm I'll basically just tell you exactly what I said over the phone just so we're all on the same page I was going to use an eligo orange storm Giga it just it wasn't going to happen also it was going to take 5 days to print and use a ton of material well I mean that using a ton of material is kind of a given but then I was thinking about our my conversations with Gabe and realized that you can sort of eliminate this problem of
time if you split it into many different parts and print them all simultaneously so it seems sort of like the perfect project for a print Farm seems super doable it's gonna be a fun project either way yeah yeah so I sent Gabe a preliminary model that I basically just modeled from scratch based on what I could find publicly online and with that small step we are officially waiting into the exciting world of copyright infringement now I'm no lawyer but the Magis spun chair is a piece of designer furniture and I assume that means that they
have certain legal protections against what some people might call knockoffs you might say morly you're 3D printing a single chair for yourself it's not like you're selling it or making the 3D printing files available online for anyone to print their very own thousand chair and you would be right I am definitely not doing those things I 100% respect magic design I think the sponge chair is absolutely worth $1,000 and all I can do is hope that they don't take this the wrong way because even if KN off is for personal use a company can still
decide to take legal action against you for making one my intention is for this to be a fun personal experiment that is meant to entertain and should in no way detract from their business in fact I hope the net result of this video is that more people buy magic Spong chairs because they see just how fun they are but at the end of the day that is for Magis to decide Magis I respect you please don't sue me if I was going to 3D print this chair I needed a 3D model surprisingly Magis actually has
one available on their website but it's a 3DS file which I couldn't import into Fusion or blender and after an online file converter failed to turn it into a useful file format I thought I'd just try creating the shape from scratch I found another website that had a dimmension silhouette of the chair that looked right so I took a screenshot imported it into Fusion scaled it to the correct size traced the silhouette and revolved it around the center axis this looked pretty good right off the bat but turning a low resolution screenshot into an accurate
3D model isn't the the most well accurate thing in the world in fact the silhouette gave no information on the inside of the chair which is pretty important for I don't know Comfort but I had a plan we were traveling through Portland Oregon which has a Design Within Reach kind of an ironic name because they sell expensive designer Furniture but I saw that They Carried the magic Spong chair so I popped in under the guise of buying some bougie furniture for my yepy Portland Loft and started measuring the floor model to verify my 3D design
surprisingly none of the staff seem to care I assume they thought we were just seeing if it would fit in our apartment and after going for a quick spin honestly Guys these chairs are so fun it basically feels like you're about to fall backwards but then the chair catches you and rolls you around and then the cherry on top is that as you roll you also slowly rotate in a circle it's like a fidget spinner for your whole body with a good spin under my belt and a notebook full of bootleg measurements I popped back
into Fusion to verify my 3D model it was actually pretty good except for the shape of the seat which I had all wrong so it's a good thing I checked so like the the edges and the tip need to be like fully solid separate little pieces or like a ring or something like that and then the rest of the pieces can be fairly low density I think for1 th000 chair I'm almost certain that it could be made uh affordably at scale or something like that with printing that's sick I was not expecting a actually good
product I was more like this is going to be some wild experiment but it sounds like like oh this could actually be like if you were cut throat copyright infringing you could uh make these affordably and scalably if I was being honest large format printing probably is the better way to kind of make this sort of a thing because like you say yeah it's one single swirl and then you're all done and it's structurally sound and good whereas since we've got all these chunks and pieces you have the walls of one piece and the walls
of the other piece to where Al bet it will be less material efficient I mean the story started as like let's make this in 3D printing because it's fun and cool but now it's turning into like oh this is actually accessible because we're doing it on like normal 3D printers with a material that everyone 3D prints with I was going to say the main problem is figuring out how to cut this thing up elegantly and then cost-wise like uh what is it going to be less than $1,000 yes oh for sure okay cool probably less
than 500 bucks I would imagine You' and at that point everything did seem amazing but I had no idea what I was in for slant 3D is located in Idaho and I'm in Vancouver British Columbia and there's this minor complication called an international border between us shipping Big Stuff across that border can get really expensive but luckily vancouverites have been getting around that problem for years there's this Tiny Town right across the border called Blaine Washington literally a 40-minute drive from the city of Vancouver and it is filled with businesses that do nothing else except
receive packages for Canadians so we can save hundreds of dollars on shipping the trick is getting it back into Canada hello hi's your home for you Vancouver how long have you been wait for uh last than an hour where'd you go I went to Hagen of blae to pick up a package what's coming back it's um basically a 3D printed chair in pieces okay what's the total value on it it's about $200 okay anything else back that's it and all call Tobacco nope byebye thank you yes oh my God oh my God oh my God
moral of the story just tell the truth at the [Music] border after weeks of waiting it was F finally time to see the 3D printed chair pieces for the first time and I quickly realized just how many pieces there were I kept thinking I was nearing the end of each box but then I would pull back some paper and sure enough there'd be another layer of pieces underneath there's already so many pieces and I still have the big [Music] box so uh I think assembling this might be a little more work than I expected dude
I I think I'm going to need to get more dowels there's like a million holes originally Gabe and I dreamed of the pieces snapping together like a Lego set but then life got in the way so we decided to keep it simple and use dowels to align the pieces and this thick epoxy glue for strength and cutting these dowels by hand instead of just buying the pre-made joinery dowels from the hardware store was my first mistake this took so long and because they're not tapered they're really hard to get into the 3D printed holes so
I ended up 3D printing a bunch of dowels which worked awesome because they're slightly undersized and I tapered the edges and for the Curious this whole chair requires 173 doels it's like I'm forging for acorns so at this point everything was feeling great the pieces looked fantastic I had everything laid out nicely I had a game plan and this epoxy I'm using total boat thicko is supposed to be super strong this is the flex version which I chose to minimize the chance of brittle joints that might snap apart it's also very thick and tacky so
my Hope was that I could just press the pieces together and they would just stay there as I glued on more pieces which in hindsight was a horrible plan oh and then I found a problem with the prints uh why don't those align I don't know what's happening here I don't know why these are misaligned but I'm just going to assume it's not a problem and keep putting them together hey Morley here's a tip how about don't do that when you see an issue that you don't understand don't just power through it and at this
point you the viewer probably also don't understand why this is such a big deal so let me show you how this thing is supposed to go together what you just saw me assemble was one pie slice that is repeated 15 times around a central core as you can see Each pie slice is supposed to go right up against the core but for some reason there's a gap between the core and this bottom piece and if the assembly had gone according to plan this probably wouldn't have been a big deal but there was another problem that
I hadn't considered oh my gosh I uh I messed up I think I should have made all the segments first I'm kind of like fighting myself now trying to press everything together and like the dowels don't make that easy I'll probably explain this more in a voice over sure thing Morley basically I neglected to think about the necessity of clamping the pieces together while the epoxy cured even though this stuff is super tacky it's not rigid and as I continued to add more pieces the Gap started to widen the pieces started to slide and the
chair began to slowly fall apart dude this is insane I I don't know how this is going to work the whole thing needs to be like compressed together it's just gradually like falling apart like look the whole thing there's just like giant gaps I don't know I don't know what to do I think the only thing like left to do right now is just power through no no morle that is not the answer watching this now is actually painful I just want to go back in time and tell myself to take 20 minutes take a
break and just R strategize but I was feeling stressed because I thought I had to move fast before the epoxy started to harden which in turn made me feel locked into this strategy and meanwhile everything in the room was getting covered in epoxy this is just not working the chair is falling apart as I'm putting it together I think my best chance of success is taking it apart completely and then redoing each connection with a bit of CA glue if I use CA glue and activator in addition to the thixo that CA glue will clamp
each piece together with a rigid connection and hopefully hold it solid enough that I can actually assemble this thing and then over the next week as the thixo cures it'll add that real strength yes Morley yes finally you come to the strategy that you should have started with all along which is so ironic because I use this superglue clamp method all the time I don't know why I didn't think of it before but it's literally perfect for this the challenge is now I have all of this half cured epoxy covering everything that I have to
work around as I undo hours of bad work and that's when I started to lose my mind it's going it's just going underne just loosen it I'm like almost just done with this it's like so messy and wasteful right it's already it's getting covered in a boxy I can't I just feel like this thing sucks I you I don't [Music] know I just kind I want a trash and start over I I think that's a totally like valid option I I just really think you should step away from it a little bit I think the
best way to sum up how I was feeling in that moment is embarrassed embarrassed that I basically ruined A month's worth of work and 50 lbs of material because I just hadn't prepared well enough a big part of me truly believe that the 3D printed chair was a lost cause and I should just throw it in the dumpster and that made me feel embarrassed because what a colossal waste of material what a huge amount of plastic pollution and I was embarrassed about how I was acting in front of Eden I felt like a kid who
just wanted to flip the game board because he had lost but I'd been working for hours and it just had gone so wrong so quickly so I am feeling or was feeling like this close to giving up this thing is so ridiculous and there's epoxy everywhere and I'm really frustrated it's taken hours just to take it a part and restart and have something that is almost kind of working but uh Eden has convinced me to keep going and we'll we'll see starting with a good [Music] foundation M on M on map going do you [Music]
shh so after a terrible start the chair actually came together I can't tell you how amazing this felt I mean I was so close to throwing this in the dumpster but I wasn't out of the woods yet first I needed to deal with the giant gaps surrounding the lower core I had epoxied this to the other core piece but there was nothing supporting it side to side and I didn't want it to just snap off when I started rolling around so I filled that Gap with expanding spray foam this is the same stuff you would
use around a door frame and it's surprisingly strong and rigid when dry I actually used it to glue the window frames to the metal walls of our van and those have held up perfectly even after driving for 8 months on bumpy dirt roads so I was confident it should be strong enough for the chair the thicko has been curing for about 2 days so it should be strong enough that we can flip it [Laughter] over all right all right it's not as heavy as I thought it would be I feel like it's of comparable weight
to the uh manufactured chair oh wow this is sick it's looking better than I than I thought it would at this point at this point my major concern was the overall strength of the chair there were some huge gaps between the pieces not gab's fault this was entirely because of my less than optimal assembly and I filled these with more epoxy over the next few days but I could only access the seams on the outside had no idea how strong the inside of the chair was or if it was all going to break apart in
some unexpected way once I started rolling around however I wasn't going to be able to test that for 5 days once the epoxy was fully cured so I thought I'd give Gabe a call to find out what happened with the core and if this was going to cost less than $1,000 hey Gabe I'm sorry that we sent you the wrong file there I finally got that tracked down a little bit it's it's all good but yeah I'm curious what happened it was Version Control one of the v1s when we were still messing with like corze
propagated all the way through to the V2 which we printed for you and I I think in the rush they had released that chunk of the model to start printing but then there was that little tweak made to the core diameter before we started printing those and got all the way through so we just made your life miserable a little bit on the other side I think like 90% I made my life miserable how long in the end did it take everything to print ultimately it's about 30 to 50 print G days so so if
a person was doing it on their own 3D printer it one 3D printer would take them 30 to 50 days how long did it take you guys in actuality with spreading it out across multiple we spread it across about 15 machines so yeah about four five days or so got it all knocked out but yeah if we were deploying this thing we' deploy it to like the number of machines that there are parts so 64 machines you'd be turning out a chair every single day if you really wanted to scale up you've got like we
could deploy it conceivably to the whole print Farm which is like 3,000 machines make like a hundred of these a day if we really really wanted to all right let's talk about how much this chair actually costs during my first meeting with Gabe he told me that slant 3D keeps their material cost Low by purchasing pellets of PLA and then melting it down themselves into filament which is way cheaper than buying rolls of filament retail well I'm going to I'm going to ruin your story just a hair on this one because we did end up
buying filament of this because we didn't have enough red in production to roll out a bunch of red for it from the in-house stuff so there wasn't enough stuff on the shelf that we just bought $15 per School filament and just ran with it but if we were making the filament ourselves like pla the raw beads of pla cost about $150 to $2 a pound so if on this chair it could be conceivably made for about 70 to 100 bucks of material off the shelf it ends up costing about 300 to $350 or $400 for
the material that was put into this and that explains why the bill from Gabe is a bit more expensive than I expected so I just got the invo voice from slant 3D the total ended up being $568 eight which breaks down to $ 46410 for printing of the 64 chair components and $13.98 for the shipping it's a bit more than I was expecting but still less than $11,000 on top of that two tubes of fof flex cost $68 bringing the grand total to $636 sense but none of that matters if the chair breaks the moment
I sit on [Music] it the chair doesn't look great it doesn't look terrible but I so wish that I did not rush the assembly but we got it built in the end I was this close to trashing this thing during the worst parts of the assembly so I feel proud that I successfully powered through shout out to Eden for encouraging me and now it's finally time to test it the worst case scenario is that it immediately breaks but if it stays together and I can successfully go for a spin in this thing it will all
be worth it all right let's do it let's try it epoxy is fully cured so it should be strong okay all right might have gone a little shallow on the seat but it's it's really comfortable I mean just sitting like this is really nice now all right I'm just slowly rocking into it can I get into a spin 3 2 1 oh my god oh my god dude I'm going the wrong way I thought I uh set myself up to go the other way but here we go we're coming [Music] around dude it's just this
one is the real one oh my God oh my God we 3D printed ,000 chair immediately immediately one of my prize possessions I am never throwing this away I was really worried that the misalign bottom Edge would cause it to like bump really aggressively when it came around but it's barely noticeable dude I am so I am so happy right now mag's design you invented something so joyful thank you and please don't sue me if you want access to exclusive behind the scenes content head on over to patreon.com and thank you to my top supporters
Paige art Luis arander and my mom Kathy Kurt [Music]
