3D Printed Boats: First Wave of Designs

 

We have detailed in a previous post how the class of students are currently working on several challenges.  One is to produce a range of boats - we have experienced success in creating these previously as is detailed in our this post.

Follow the success of the first design students have been working on a range of designs, and creating and bouncing ideas off each other.  The Titanic is a 3D Print that is available in various guises on a range of sites, and we have printed it in full in the past.

Hence the design shown above has four funnels (our students loved locating fact that only three of these were legitimate and the fourth funnel was in fact a prop!)

The first design measures 180mm long was 55mm wide at the mid point and 70mm high.   The funnels were part of this, being 20mm high.  The ship in this case took four hours to print.

The second design (shown left) had slightly different dimensions - and took slightly longer to print.   This was four and a half hours.   It measured 160mm long was 60mm wide and featured two distinct decks - the student wanted to add details to this design so attempted to look at ways to have windows or cabin windows on the side of the boat.   The student wanted the funnels to stand out significantly, so in this incident had the four (again inspired by the Titanic) at the top of the design. 

There is another important lesson in this boat, which is called 'will it float' and the answer is no! The student in this case has built the funnels too tall and the weight of them causes the boat to tip, when it is placed in water.   This is a vital engineering lesson to the students - which can be illustrated by placing the boat in water.    The student is going to be given the opportunity to address and redesign this, which should take place easily using Tinkercad.

Its one of those things were the fact that the design is completed but it only with printing that the student can identify a fault - and also we will go back to the 'motion' animation to look if it is sustainable.

The final design that we would like to show is the boat shown left.  The student has again opted for the four funnels, has included an oversized flag (we have discussed the idea of using decals for the boats, potentially created using our sticker making machine) and there was a clear using of a personalisation - this student had used the idea of sinking the lettering into a design as we had been working on with the lesson to upgrade the display of the badges of the name plates.

In this case the design measured 150mm long was 60mm wide and 55mm high.   This design was suitable size wise and the student was thrilled with it - it also was very balanced relative to floating.

We are going to give our juniors a choice to look at testing this boats, seeing which ones that they like and also which ones they are able to float or race against each other.