Wednesday, May 2, 2018

3D Printed Storage Stand Delux V2.0

Above: Print project shown in profile.
Challenge: For student to produce a individualised storage stand, featuring a draw, personalised by 3D printing complete with multiple filament designs/segments.
Background: This print was first attempted as a basic draw with a combination of pink filament and blue filament and was detailed on this blog here.  The student, following the school holidays in New Zealand completed the processs and refined it significantly (so it has a passing resemblance to the previous project).   This student who is nine years old has been responsible for printing a number of projects on this site and is using a 3D Printer for the first time.   She initially was producing stands and storage areas and we wanted to challenge her to complete a project with additional challenges for her.  The storage draw in particular proved to be considerable problematic to get the sizing right.  Initial prints tended to be quite loose as she was
Above: Design shown with draw open
having some trouble creating a drawer to fit into the base of the design that could be accessed.   She also had to experiment with varying degrees of ways to open the draw at the base of the design.
 Level of Difficulty: Difficult.   This has been a long drawn out process which has required considerable reworking and redesign.  The print took place in multiple stages and required significant reworking.   The original design featured a horse that was built into the stand, this had particularly thin legs, which caused it to to be damaged when it was removed with the rafting.   The student then redesigned the print and featured the horse head, shown in the photograph.  The mane of the horse trailed below the print, this was solved by the student who printed a base for the horse head to be raised up allowed the mane to trail behind the horse.   Initially the name of the student was to have been sunk into the side of the design, into the base of the pink filament.   However, the student felt this was unsatisfactory and removed the lettering, and replaced it with the blue block lettering, as shown in the photograph.  The final design from the student featured a hole created in the edge of the internal drawer, as she felt this was the preferred option to open the draw. 
Timeframe: There are multi parts to this project.      The base was twelve hours in print length (this needs to be addressed as it featured a horse that was removed from the print base, so one would estimate this would be ten hours or so), the horse head was two hours (sourced from Tinkercad as a freely available print), the blue lettering featuring the students name was an hour, the internal draw was three hours.    The entire print time for a project such as this would be in the range of seventeen hours, and this is the minimum requirement for a multi-part project such as this.   
Above: Rear of the design
Size:   The project had a number of component parts.   The main base was 95mm wide, 140mm long and was hollowed out on the inside (to allow for the storage draw).   The base at the back rose 120mm.   The horse head was 80mm high and 40mm across,  the lettering was typically 20mm high, 20mm across and 10mm thick, although this varied slightly (the horseshoe was 5mm thick for instance).   The draw was 120mm deep, 80mm wide and 8mm thick.   There could be some variation with the design to meet other requirements (different sized feature on the stand etc).
What we would do differently: The print has been ongoing for several weeks for the student to get it to the point that she was happy with it.   Printing it in components or stages allowed the different PLA to contrast the colours and she was extremely pleased with that.   The initial design featured a pink horse, the student would not have included this had she seen the effect that was created by the blue filament.
Next steps for the student:  Given all the effort that went into the print the student has completed this to the highest possible level.   The draw is the very last stage of the post, that could have been redesigned but the student has spent several days getting the drawer to the stage that it has. 

2 comments:

  1. I liked the horsey personalisation with this one- and the variety in colours.

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  2. Yes it took quite some time for the student to complete all the different aspect but we were wanting to stretch the student to complete something more challenging. The variety with the different colour are something that we are continuing to experiment with, and really enjoying the affect it is having on our print. Thank you for the comment, as always.

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