3D Printing Service
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Project Manus is MIT’s effort to upgrade campus makerspaces and foster student maker communities.
Address
77 Massachusetts Ave,
Building 35-237
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone
(617) 258-7609Connect
In a makersystem, local makerspaces network together to offer specialized capabilities to a larger community.
We are working hard to make sure MIT students have access to the tools, spaces and information they need to make, create and innovate.
Mobius connects students, faculty and researchers with nearby resources they can use to make, measure and innovate.
The MIT 3D Printing Service experiment has reached its end of life as of December 2023. You will find information about its history and a list of current alternatives below.
The 3D Printing Service was an experiment launched by MIT Project Manus in September of 2017 with a small number of 3D printers hosted by MIT CopyTech.
Over the lifetime of the service, it had been only lightly used by the MIT Community. While it provided value for the members of the community who used it, it served an increasingly narrow set of use cases because of its limited number of printers and materials, while at the same time 3D printing in MIT makerspaces and commercial services providing robust printing services with many different materials and fast turnaround times became increasingly available and easy to use.
As the printers that made up the service reached their end of life at the end of 2023, we made the decision to shut down the 3D Printing Service and conclude the experiment.
For those of you who may have intended to use the service after 2023, we've put together a list of alternatives below. These include both on-campus printing resources if you are interested in joining a makerspace and learning how to 3D print yourself, and commercial off-campus services if you just want a part fabricated for you. (You can also find this list make.mit.edu/outsource.)
Join the Metropolis and The Deep makerspaces open to members of the MIT community and learn how to use the 3D printers in both makerspaces to print your own parts and models. For more information on an orientation and signing up for a short digital fabrication training class, see make.mit.edu/metropolis.
We maintain a list of local and remote 3D printing services that will print your job for you and send you back the finished part. Below is a snapshot of the list as of January 2024. You can find the latest version of the list along with other kinds of outside fabricators (for things like laser cutting or machining) at make.mit.edu/outsource.
If you questions about the 3D Printing Service experiment, please email us at 3d-print-srvc@mit.edu.
