Flexible printed cage bounces a raw egg from 2.5 metres

Nov 05, 2026 Last reply: 20 hours ago 3 Replies
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The hardest part of a project like this must be holding a raw egg firmly inside something that is itself squishy. The maker tackled it with an inner egg-shaped ring carried on diagonal supports inside a light blue cubical wireframe. The ring is concave inside, which the maker says makes the hold more firm, and it stretches in one direction while pinching the egg in the perpendicular direction. That combination is credited with keeping the egg retained well.



The whole thing is printed in TPU 75A at 2.85mm diameter, on a Bambu H3C. The resulting cube is flexible enough to be squeezed and compressed in your hands, which I think is exactly what a part like this should feel like. A soft wireframe that still holds its shape around the egg seems like a well-judged balance.



For testing, a whole brown chicken egg was pressed into the central ring, and the maker worked up to drop heights of about 2.5m. The frame bounces repeatedly on landing while keeping the egg off the ground. It is not perfect, though: the egg does crack if it lands perfectly flat on the open egg side. That is the one clear trade-off in the design as it stands.



When the egg was cracked open afterwards, the raw yolk and white were revealed intact, so the surviving drops were genuinely gentle on the contents. The maker says the project was made for no particular reason, just a chance to try out TPU 75A, and honestly that is my favourite kind of build. Sometimes a silly idea is the best excuse to learn a new material.


The concave inner ring is my favourite detail here. The maker says it makes the hold more firm, and pairing that with the ring stretching one way and pinching the other seems like a clever way to grip a fragile object with a soft material. Choosing TPU 75A for the whole frame is a bold call, but the repeated bouncing speaks for itself.

How did the maker get TPU 75A to print cleanly on the H3C? That shore hardness is very soft, so I would expect a lot of sag on the diagonal supports and the ring overhangs. Was it printed in one piece with the ring bridging in place, or in parts that were assembled afterwards? Any details on orientation would be handy.

Since the known failure mode is a perfectly flat landing on the open egg side, a simple improvement could be adding a thin flexible strut or membrane across that opening, still in the same TPU. It would only need to stop the egg exiting flat onto the ground while keeping the cage squeezable. That might turn the one weak orientation into a safe one without much extra material.

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