3D printer for printing Clay/Paste

This is a custom clay 3D printer I designed and built for my mechanical engineering capstone project. It does work and we were able to build it without any major issues, although it could probably use some minor changes based on things we learned while building it. We had a budget of only $500 dollars and managed to build it for just shy of that cost. That said, we were able to get some parts for free by scavenging parts off of capstone project designs from previous years and those parts would have definitely pushed the cost over $500. The parts we obtained for free were all of the 1" T-slot aluminum extrusions, and all of the HG15 linear rails which had originally been sourced from McMaster. Most of the parts for this design were 3D printed. The type of filament used was ASA, as well as a little bit of PLA+ and TPU in some places.

It's overall design and aesthetic is pretty heavily influenced by the Voron Switchwire but most of the parts were designed from scratch. The parts that were taken from either a Voron, or Voron mod are:

-The display case (Taken from Switchwire)
-The 80 tooth pulley on the extruder (Taken from Voron M4 extruder and modified for this project)
-The Y-axis bearing block/belt mount (Taken from Switchwire and modified)
-The Y-axis belt tensioner (Taken from a mod for the Switchwire and then modified further)

Everything else was designed from scratch.

I can't upload the .step files to openbuilds for some reason so I uploaded them to GrabCAD instead. Here is the link to the step files of the entire printer, as well as the extruder by itself:

Free CAD Designs, Files & 3D Models | The GrabCAD Community Library

I still plan on uploading a full BOM but I need to make some revisions to the current BOM before I can do that.

Below is the Printer shown with the 1st test print after printing completed. Nozzle is about 2.3 mm diameter.




CAD Renders:




Diagram of extruder: