An update to an infusion cup for tea nerds
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updated October 13, 2022

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After more than a year of testing and improving I finally announce an update to a design I once remixed and never really have been entirely happy with: the “rocking cup” as I like to call it now.

You love tea? You hate teabags? Sick of using tea-tongues, tea-strainers, tea-eggs and whatnot? Don't care about drinking hot beverages from printed plastic cups? Then this is for you!

Usage is quite simple:

  1. insert tea into tea compartment
  2. pour water into water segment
  3. let tea infuse
  4. tip cup into de-fuse position
  5. enjoy 

There are 3 designs you can choose from. Most recommended are those with the thickest walls and the highest version numbers. Thick walls make the cups more comfortable to touch and increase chances of watertightness. Also balance is slightly better with the later designs.

This once again is a tricky print; on a trickyness-scale from 1 to 10 it's a solid unexpected 9 if you insist on decent quality and usefulness. Here's why:

Use temperature-resistant and food-safe, odorless filament. Sourcing materials turned out harder than expected. PLA-based high-temp materials often are supposed to be food-safe but smell funny in boiling hot water. I don't trust them. PETG or PET is rather likely to leach out nasty chemicals at >70°C and probably will warp after some time. ABS/ASA isn't really food safe and so is PC and most PAs. So I ended with a CPE named “colorfabb HT” which is supposed to be somewhat safe and keeps rigid at 100°C. Fiberlogy CPE HT is also very similar, maybe even the same base material.

Printing this material without fan and still a perfect overhang can be quite the challenge, so you might have to give it a few tries. I had to fine-tune flow percentage and layer height for nice and sturdy results. Also print as hot as the filament allows; pouring boiling water into the cold cup will perform serious stress on your layers and more often than once I experienced cracking sounds followed by water leaks after the 1st pour. So layer adhesion is key here once again.

Exclaimer: food-safe printing, even with supposedly food-safe materials in FDM isn't really possible. The layer lines allow for bacterial/fungal growth and after heavy usage you won't be able to clean the cups completely. There will always be some residues in the crevices… but real tea nerds don't ever clean their cups anyway… so who cares, right?

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