3D printing records: the largest, smallest and fastest prints

Highlighted terms are explained briefly when you hover over or tap them.

A boat you cannot see with the naked eye. A printer as big as a hall. A Benchy in under a minute. There are astonishing records around 3D printing, but also many headlines with “largest” or “first” that do not stand up to scrutiny. Only records with a reliable source are listed here: Guinness World Records, universities or trade media.

The largest prints

The largest polymer printer and the largest solid object

On 10 October 2019, the University of Maine in the USA set three Guinness records at once. Its large-format plastic printer has a build volume of 343.61 m³ and was recognised as the largest prototype polymer 3D printer.

As proof, the team printed a boat: the “3Dirigo”. It is a good 7.6 metres long, weighs around 2.3 tonnes and was printed in three days. This earned the records for the largest 3D-printed boat and the largest solid 3D-printed object, at 2.06 m³ of material. “Solid” really does mean solid here: 100 % infill, with no honeycomb structure.

In April 2024 the university presented a successor. According to its figures, it is four times as large, can print parts of about 29 × 9.75 × 5.5 metres and processes up to around 225 kg of plastic per hour.

The largest printed structure

Since 25 February 2025, the Guinness record for the largest printed structure by volume has been held by a restaurant in Dubai. The companies Proto21 and Myata Platinum Restaurant used 13.75 m³ of printed material. The interesting part: this included perfectly ordinary desktop printers. According to Voxelmatters, FDM printers, resin printers and large-format printers ran for three months, producing over 10,500 parts in PLA, PETG and glass-fibre-reinforced PP. More on these materials in Filaments compared.

Be careful with headlines about the “world’s largest printed building”: the well-known office building by Apis Cor in Dubai (2019) is often called that. According to an enquiry by 3DPrint.com to Guinness, however, the company has never held a Guinness title.

The tallest printed sculpture of a human

The British YouTuber James Bruton printed an oversized version of himself in 2018: 3.62 metres tall, printed on two printers in about 500 hours, using around 50 kg of filament. Guinness recognised the figure in April 2018 as the tallest printed sculpture of a human. A nice example of the fact that large objects can also be built on ordinary printers in many individual parts.

The smallest prints

For tiny objects, you use not a nozzle but a laser. In two-photon lithography (also multiphoton lithography), a laser is focused into a drop of resin. Only exactly at the focal point does the material cure. This produces structures smaller than the width of a hair.

The smallest sculpture of a human

In 2015, the artist Jonty Hurwitz had a figure called “Trust” printed at the Karlsruhe Nano Micro Facility in Germany. It measures 80 × 100 × 30 micrometres. Guinness confirmed the record on 13 February 2015. Shortly afterwards the figure had disappeared, according to Guinness probably crushed accidentally by a finger.

The smallest Benchy

In 2020, researchers at Leiden University printed a 3DBenchy that is only 30 micrometres long. The boat was made for a study on tiny swimmers in liquids and was described in the journal Soft Matter. It is not an official Guinness record, but it is considered the smallest Benchy ever printed.

The fastest prints

There is no official record for speed, but there is a lively community competition: the #SpeedBoatRace. The aim is to print a Benchy as fast as possible. The rules specify layer height and line width, among other things; appearance is secondary.

As of October 2026. These are community records, not officially certified values. They are documented in the community and reported by trade media such as Tom’s Hardware and Hackster.

What is behind 59 seconds? According to Hackster, Roetz built his own hotend that can melt around 400 mm³ of plastic per second, compressed-air cooling at about 400 litres per minute, and a frame on a granite slab to damp vibrations. For comparison: according to the official Benchy page, a normal Benchy usually takes under two hours. So it has little to do with everyday printing, but it shows where the limits of motion, melting and cooling lie. Why these three factors limit speed is covered in Print speed.

Why records should be read with caution

New “world records” constantly appear in 3D printing, often in manufacturers’ press releases. Always check who confirmed the record, in which category and when. Guinness records are tied to precise definitions, for example “by volume” or “prototype”. Community records sometimes change monthly.

Continue with: Printed houses, rockets and organs and The history of 3D printing.