Market day 2025 - Final Print Runs

 

It is currently the school holidays in New Zealand between term three and term four, we will be back to our regular schedule of printing at that time.   In the meantime we are preparing for the major school event for the year as regular visitors to this site will be aware - our School Market Day for 2025 is taking place on Friday 31st October.

Challenge: To produce a unique product featuring personalisation, innovation and creation using the technology available to our students.

Background: Every student in the senior school at Auroa Primary School as well as the middle school classrooms.   As we have explained before we have seven groups that are operating, one of which is the 'Bath Toys' themed group.  These designs have been previously detailed and adapted and these versions are now the personalised versions that are available to customers.   These prints and the process to create them has been detailed on posts on this blog such as here.

Level of Difficulty: Medium - the design that is shown here has undergone several revisions, however all of the key features of the design have come from the main Tinkercad interface, and the students concerned have been able to revise the design several times.   An example of this is the adaption to remove several additional features to ensure that the design is as plain as possible.   Given that there are children who could be handling the designs (although we have also looked into age appropriate toys for the group as well for instance no under two year olds) the students removed earlier features like eyebrows and details on the hat or anything that could be interpreted as sharp.

Size: 80mm across, 80mm wide/long and 60mm high.  This was the dimensions of one of four designs that had similar dimensions that were printed simultaneously on the Bambu H2D.   The students have always intended to have a group of designs, three in total, and this is intended as the biggest of the three.

Cost: The machine indicated that to print the four designs on standard default settings that 200g of filament would be used and the cost would be $5.00 (USD) to complete the print (of four).

Timeframe: The completion of the print took eight hours in total on the Bambu H2D.   The project would not have been undertaken on the Snapmaker for the reasons that the duration would have been in the range of 16 hours and that would have also called into question the ability of the machine to print all four designs without any problems.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: There is a couple of issues that are still needing to be identified with the range of print.   The biggest issue which is not clearly visible is under.

As can be seen in the picture shown left, the base of the design has a small hole in it, which has occurred as a result of the printing process.   This is visible in the top left had corner of the print.   The student will be needing to problem solve this issue when they return next term.    By not water proofing the design at this point the design when tested has shown to fill with water and while it does not damage the integrity of the print, the students need to seal it.

The teacher has in mind using a hot glue gun or using a water sealant on this part of the design but the students are going to undertake the research and testing when they return from the school holidays.