Last night we ventured into RoboBeast’s new offices for the 3D Printing Meetup Johannesburg.

As promised, the place was packed to the rafters with 3D printers, filament, and enthusiastic discussion around printing in three dimensions.

Among the representatives there were RoboBeast, African Robot, House 4 hack, CAD House, Fouche 3D Printing, Sahara Systems, and even Verbatim. If there is a familiar face in the local 3D printing scene, they were there last night.

But it wasn’t just about touching base and talking over drinks (although that was a huge part of it); everyone brought along their newest or strangest print to show off.

Concrete and car jacks

That interesting design above is actually made of solid concrete. It comes from Fouche 3D Printing who recently brought us a car jack that not only lifted a real car and was 3D printed, but was also made out of plastic.

We wrote about the jack earlier this week, but the pictures we had didn’t show off the scale of the thing. Having it to hand also reiterated just how strong a plastic print can be.

“Glass” bottles

Originally shared on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for thinking these aren’t real glass bottles because they look so real. Bernhard Vogt from CAD House created these in SLA and polished them to get the clear finish.

Giant horse skull

Rick Treweek (founder of Trobok Toys and creative director at RoboBeast) again showed off his chops at creating large prints.

The horse skull sculpture took a solid 24 hours to print and caused a panic in the office when it began to lift off of the print bed (requiring an emergency application of superglue to the base).

Everything else