Remote Clay 3D Printing Demonstration 

Hi Bob, I don't know of anybody mixing dry clay and water in the extruder chamber. Early days with WASP and watching them doing their architectural scale printing, for eases of material delivery I did wonder about the extruder head mixing dry clay ingredients and water. The dry clay powder would be easier to pipe to the printhead rather than a paste mix that needs a lot of force to be moved down a pipe. The drawback of mixing in the printhead is that freshly mixed clay is very short, it is not very plastic and the extrusion crack up very easily. On an architectural scale this might not be too bad but if you are working at a pottery scale you want a good well matured plastic clay for a good extrusion. I don't know if you have seen my video 'Clay Extrusion 3D Printing - The Process' ( ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-M2grAyX8sdE.html ) but about 33 minutes into that I talk about the shortcomings of freshly mixed clay. That said I would not want to put anybody off trying new things. For all I know in-printhead mixing might be just the breakthrough we need. On the subject of in-printhead mixing the French company 3D Minerals ( www.3d-minerals.com/lang_en/ ) are doing something interesting, although I have not got to the bottom of it exactly. I think they are deflocculating the clay to make it more runny to pump to the printhead and then deflocculating it, making it stiff again in the printhead for the extrusion.