Hello everyone,
The Wayne Makerspace is bustling with activity since the start of the semester. Students spend time doing homework, work on engineering projects, drawing & designing, and just hanging out. Students taking the Tools for Engineering class are busy creating their first Lego Mindstorms robots, testing software programs that control motors and wheels:
A couple of months ago, a community member brought a plastic window clip that frequently broke due to poor design:
Dusty re-created the clip in CAD, close to the original yet improved to reduce potential stress and breakage.
While the clip is small and looks simple, printing it was quite a challenge! Because 3D printing creates layers from the ground up, the clip contains a number of overhangs and diagonal angles that are difficult to reproduce, requiring the printer to create these structures in mid-air.
To handle complex shapes, 3D printers create “supports” which are temporarily posts of plastic which are broken off and discarded when printing is finished. The orientation of the part (which end is “up”) makes a big difference when printing. It determines how much support material is needed and how difficult it could be remove it.
For the window clip, we tried printing at different orientations, such as nose down and right-side up:
Upside down and nose-up:
And sideways:
The purple areas are supports that needed removed after printing. We found that the nose-up orientation (#4) produced the best result, which minimal supports needed. It was a lot of trial an error for such a small, seemingly simple part!
Last Friday, a handful of kids from the Orrville Boys and Girls Club visited Wayne College for a CAD and 3D printing training session. For two hours, Dusty and I taught them the physics of acceleration and how to design the body tube of a model rocket, complete with their inscribed name. They learned how to draw shapes in Solidworks, set dimensions, perform extrusions, etc. You could tell they were quite interested in the project.
Future training sessions will involve designing fins, a nosecone, using the 3D scanner, and actually printing & launching their rockets!
See how a Chinese company created four large-scale 3D printers to create buildings from recycled materials of other buildings:
For past e-mail postings, check-out our blog at:
http://blogs.uakron.edu/waynec3/
Tom