Wood 3D Printing

There were many submissions to our Holiday Ornament challenge this year. The 1st and 2nd place winners were already announced a couple of weeks back. Another one of our favorites was the Christmas Star submitted by Forest Denton. We really liked his design for its geometric simplicity and also thought it would be a great example to have our friends at Desktop Metal 3D print it with a revolutionary process they are about to bring to the market called Forust.

The Forust 3D Printer was created to make high-volume wood 3D printing affordable, reliable, and sustainable with two goals in mind:

  1. Produce strong and lightweight wood components where the speed, precision, and quality of binder jetting are applied.
  2. Build a sustainable future and achieve net-zero carbon emissions through additive rematerialization, where the materials used are derived from two wood waste streams (sawdust and lignin – a bio-epoxy resin composite).

When we asked Forest what was the inspiration behind his design. He said his design came as a mixture of some of his favorite Christmas designs, mainly the geometric beauty of a snowflake and the iconic simplicity of a Christmas star.

“This is actually the first (and almost certainly not the last) 3D modeling contest I’ve participated in and I’m happy with how it turned out and even happier that it got 3rd place. I’d like to thank my family who encouraged me to get into 3D modeling and my friends who helped me brainstorm ideas (Thanks Christian!)”

Wood 3D Printing

Even though Forest didn’t come into any prize money this year we hope he’ll be happy with the wooden ornament he’ll be able to display next Christmas and beyond. As well with the added knowledge that it was created with a sustainable process that takes byproduct waste from the wood and paper industries and turns them into functional products.

Congratulations Forest and a big thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Ornament Challenge!