THE MACHINES BEHIND MAXI3DCUSTOMS
Behind every finished print at Maxi3DCustoms is a rather unusual little team. They don’t ask for wages, they don’t take lunch breaks and, thankfully, none of them have worked out how to join a union yet. 😂 What they do have are very different jobs, their own little personalities, and names that mean a huge amount to our family.
At the centre of the filament-printing side is ODESSA, one of our main FDM workhorses. She takes care of a huge amount of our everyday printing, turning reels of filament into everything from practical parts to custom creations. When there’s a job that needs doing, Odessa is normally the one quietly getting on with it — hour after hour, layer after layer. Of course, like any hardworking member of the team, she occasionally decides that the filament would look much better as spaghetti, but nobody’s perfect. 😂🍝🖨️ Her name was chosen in memory of Odin, so every time Odessa gets to work, there’s a little piece of his story running alongside her.
Then there’s BENJAMIN, our ELEGOO Centauri Carbon 2 and the precision specialist of the FDM department. Benjamin works with a finer nozzle than Odessa, so when a filament print has smaller features, finer details or just needs that little bit more precision, he gets the job. Think of Odessa as the dependable all-rounder and Benjamin as the one standing beside her with a magnifying glass saying, “I think we can make that bit slightly sharper.” 🔍😂 His name comes from Ben, my first dog and such a huge part of my childhood, which makes having Benjamin working away in the workshop particularly special.
Keeping those two supplied is BUSTER, our Creality filament dryer. Now, technically Buster doesn’t print anything at all — but we try not to mention that too loudly because he considers himself a very important member of staff. 😂 His job is to keep our filament warm, dry and in good condition before it reaches the printers. Moisture and filament are not exactly best mates, so Buster sits behind the scenes making sure the material is ready when Odessa or Benjamin need it. In other words, everybody else gets the glory while Buster does one of those jobs that you only truly appreciate when nobody has done it. Rather fittingly, he’s still looking after everybody. 🐾❤️
And when filament printing simply isn’t fine enough, the job moves over to our resin department, where AERO & SIMBA take over as a proper double act.
SIMBA is our resin printer and the member of the crew we call on when a model needs extremely fine detail. Resin printing allows us to reproduce much smaller features and smoother details than we can achieve with a standard FDM setup, making Simba particularly useful for intricate models and detailed pieces. He does the clever bit of actually creating the print — although what comes out of the machine is definitely not ready to go straight onto somebody’s shelf.
That’s where AERO comes in. Aero handles the washing and curing stage after Simba has finished printing. Fresh resin prints need to be properly cleaned and then cured before they’re finished, so the two machines really do work as a team: Simba makes it, Aero cleans up after him. Which, depending on how you look at it, probably means Aero has the least glamorous job in the entire workshop. 😂🧼✨
Together, ODESSA, BENJAMIN, BUSTER, SIMBA and AERO cover the different stages and styles of printing we use at Maxi3DCustoms. Some print, one keeps the filament behaving itself, another handles the finishing work, and occasionally one of them throws a tantrum just to remind us who is really in charge of the workshop. 😂
But there’s a much more important reason they have names instead of simply being called “Printer 1”, “Printer 2” and “that thing that dries the filament.”
Every one of those names comes from an animal that has been part of our family and our lives. They each left us with memories that we wanted to carry forward, and naming the machines after them means those names now have a place in something our family has built together.
So when you order something from Maxi3DCustoms, somewhere behind the scenes Odessa might be laying down the layers, Benjamin could be obsessing over the finer details, Buster will be guarding the filament, Simba may be producing something ridiculously intricate, and Aero will probably be cleaning up after him.
Just another normal day at Maxi3DCustoms. 😂🐾🖨️❤️