Now you can print 3D in chocolate.

http://now.msn.com/money/0410-3d-chocolate-printer.aspx


Just went on sale today .

Right now, it looks a bit slow and expensive to buy, but I can see a
real
use for it. Can you imagine taking a photo of something and having
the candy shop make it in chocolate? Or having some personal item
like a wedding ring converted to a triple sized chocolate ring?

Or chocolate reproductions of some of your body parts.
--

Ed Pawlowski wrote:
>
> Now you can print 3D in chocolate.
>
> http://now.msn.com/money/0410-3d-chocolate-printer.aspx
>
> Just went on sale today .
>
> Right now, it looks a bit slow and expensive to buy, but I can see a
> real
> use for it. Can you imagine taking a photo of something and having
> the candy shop make it in chocolate? Or having some personal item
> like a wedding ring converted to a triple sized chocolate ring?
>
> Or chocolate reproductions of some of your body parts.
> --

The pictures I've seen of its output look
like this machine needs more work. It doesn't
look like they've got the flow control working
very well. When it tried to write CHOCOLATE
by stacking five layers, the bottom two were
significantly fatter, probably because the
chocolate was warmer and flowed faster.
The top three layers were thinner and more
sharply defined, presumably because the
chocolate had cooled down before being printed.
That said, I'm surprised they can do it at all.
Chocolate has much different properties than
the materials used for 3D printing, pretty much
the opposite properties. It has a wide pasty
range between liquid and solid, high batch-to-
batch variation, supercools, etc.

I'd be leery about advancing money to a start-up,
especially when it looks like the engineering
isn't quite finished.