A lot of amazing inventions have been created in plastic via the magic of 3D printing: we’ve seen prosthetics, full robots and even other 3D printers. But Fouche 3D Printing is going industrial with a working car jack.

This amazing print is on Thingiverse for anyone to copy but the one on show here was created on the Cheetah 2 3D Printer. The last time we saw a Cheetah printer, it was big enough to install a hammock in, and the time before that it was printing working lawnmowers.

We cannot recommend strongly enough not printing and using one of these yourself even though the files are available. Fouche’s Cheetah printer uses a raw pellet feedstock and is capable of printing especially robust parts at large scales thanks to its size and Fouche’s experience making everything from chocolate sculptures to concrete blocks with a RepRap-derivative design. Unless you really know what you’re doing, just admire his handy work here.

The jack was printed from ABS granules in two main parts which took justthree hours to print. Some nuts and bolts holds the parts together and a threaded bar is used to apply the force.

“Amazingly, the one hinge pin was drilled and tapped [the threaded bar] into the ABS Plastic , and this stood up to a full day of testing, before striping,” Said Hans Fouche, creator of the Cheetah 3D printer and this jack, “This will be modified. The knee joint also suffered from alignment problems, and will have to be re-engineered, but as a first prototype, it performed remarkably well.”

Fouche is claiming that this is two world firsts: a working car jack made from plastic, as well as one that is 3D printed.

The Cheetah 3D printer used for this project has a 3 mm nozzle, is fed from granules and boasts a one cubic meter print volume and it retails for $10 000 (R140 790).