Ivan Miranda has built a lot of oversized, absurd, and occasionally load-bearing things out of PLA and PETG over the years, but his latest project inverts the usual formula. Instead of going bigger, he went smaller — and made it travel-friendly. The Mirandetta, as detailed on Miranda's own product page, is a nearly all-3D-printed motorbike/scooter that a rider can actually sit on and drive, yet which breaks down small enough to check as airline luggage.
That's not a marketing exaggeration born of a name that rhymes with "vendetta." The structural shell — frame and body panels alike — is printed plastic, and Miranda designed every part to fit within the build volume of a printer with at least a 300mm x 300mm bed, meaning nothing on the Mirandetta requires an oversized machine or exotic tooling to reproduce. Design files are sold on his site for $40, with the caveat, spelled out on the product page itself, that this is a hobbyist build with no guarantee any given buyer will end up with a functional motorbike and no electrical wiring instructions included, for safety reasons. Owners need to fully disassemble the machine to actually get it into a suitcase — this is not a fold-and-go scooter, it's a take-it-apart-and-go scooter.
A Design Brief Built Around a Suitcase
Neither Miranda's product listing nor Hackaday's coverage, published July 10, 2026, puts a number of days on how long the build took, but the design brief comes through clearly in both sources: everything had to collapse down far enough to travel as checked luggage. There's a bit of linguistic hedging worth noting, too — Miranda calls the finished vehicle a "motorbike" in his own video, while Hackaday's write-up dryly observes that what comes out of the suitcase "is clearly a scooter." Semantics aside, footage from the end of that video, shot at Maker Faire Prague, shows the finished Mirandetta getting a real test ride. That travel constraint shaped everything downstream. A conventional e-scooter or minibike frame is typically one continuous welded or bolted structure that doesn't want to come apart. The Mirandetta's printed shell, by contrast, was designed from the outset as a kit of sections that bolt together for riding and unbolt again for transport. It's a neat inversion of how most 3D-printed vehicle projects work: rather than printing parts to bolt onto a metal frame, the printed parts largely are the frame.
Under the Skin: Off-the-Shelf Power, Printed Structure
Miranda didn't try to print the powertrain — sensibly, since batteries, motors, and tires are exactly the kind of components that are cheaper, safer, and more reliable bought than fabricated. Per Hackaday's report, the Mirandetta runs on hot-swappable power-tool batteries, paired with an e-bike motor and an electronic speed controller. Rolling stock comes from lawnmower tires rather than anything scooter- or motorcycle-specific — narrow 3D-printed rims round over the normally-flat tires to make them work in this application — a pragmatic choice that keeps the parts bin generic and easy to restock anywhere. That combination of commodity electrical components and printed structure is very much in Miranda's wheelhouse — he's built a career out of proving that a desktop printer and standard hardware-store parts can substitute for machined or welded assemblies in surprisingly demanding applications. The power-tool battery choice is a smart one for a travel-oriented vehicle: those packs are designed to be pulled and swapped in seconds. Per Hackaday, that also happens to be a convenient answer to the "how do you fly with a bike that has a battery in it" problem — airport security shouldn't have much issue with the setup, provided the batteries travel as carry-on rather than packed inside the checked suitcase, which is standard practice for spare lithium cells on any commercial flight anyway.
The Kickstand Problem
One detail that stands out in the Hackaday writeup is how much attention Miranda paid to something as mundane as the kickstand. On a normal bike, a kickstand is an afterthought — a bent piece of steel and a spring. On a printed vehicle with no separate metal subframe to anchor hardware to, getting a kickstand to reliably hold a loaded vehicle upright, deploy cleanly, and not fatigue or crack under repeated printed-plastic stress is a genuinely harder engineering problem. Miranda's solution is a bistable mechanism — a design that snaps decisively into either the "stowed" or "deployed" position rather than lingering in some floppy in-between state, the way a light switch snaps to on or off rather than resting halfway. Hackaday singled the mechanism out as a highlight of the build. Miranda carried the same everything-printed philosophy over to the seat, which he made from TPU — the flexible filament makers reach for when they need grip, cushioning, or wear resistance that rigid PLA or PETG can't provide — rather than sourcing a padded seat off the shelf. That's a small but telling detail: it separates a project built to be shown off once from one meant to survive being set up and folded down repeatedly at a multi-day event like Maker Faire Prague.
What It Means for Makers
The Mirandetta lands at an interesting intersection of two trends in the maker-vehicle space: fully 3D-printed structural builds (rather than printed brackets bolted to metal frames) and vehicles designed around commodity power-tool batteries instead of purpose-built e-bike packs. For makers who want to replicate or study the design, the practical takeaways are straightforward. First, the whole thing was engineered around a printer with at least a 300mm x 300mm bed, which is a large but not exotic volume — plenty of mid-range and enthusiast-tier printers clear that bar, so this isn't a project gated behind a $5,000 machine. Second, the reliance on hot-swappable power-tool batteries and an e-bike motor rather than custom battery packs and motor controllers means the electrical side of the build is largely a parts-sourcing exercise rather than a design one, which lowers the bar for anyone wanting to attempt something similar. The $40 file price is modest for a complete rideable-vehicle design, though buyers should go in with eyes open about the tradeoff at the center of the whole project: the "packs into a suitcase" pitch means full disassembly, not a quick fold. Anyone expecting scooter-style one-motion collapsibility will be disappointed; anyone who wants a genuinely novel case study in printed-structure vehicle design — one that got a real test ride at Maker Faire Prague, caught on camera — gets exactly what's advertised.
