3D Printing: Repairing a Office Guillotine

 

Challenge: Repair an item from the office that is not functional - a miniature guillotine.

Background: This harks back to one of our earlier projects here on our blog over ten years ago when we first used our (admittedly very basic) 3D Printers to attempt to repair various items around school that needed replacement buttons or parts.   We were creating for the first time, so the scale of the prints was not particularly large.   With ten years of experience behind us as a teacher and a huge wealth of experience with the students we are sometimes looking for different projects and different tasks to complete.   This example came from our office.

The sliding guillotine has had the end of it broken.  The identification of the problem and a potential solution was to create a piece that would be able to be held in place, or realistically super-glued into place that would hold the unit together and allow the unit to work as intended.

We have highlighted in the past how we are looking for projects that can be completed by the entire class (of nearly thirty students) due to their size and level of complexity.   

In this instance the biggest issue was for the students to be accurate.   The need to be accurate was based 

around the need to be accurate using Tinkercad.   

There were nearly thirty designs completed and we have begun the process of printing the designs and then applying them to the object to see if they meet the criteria. 

Early examples were slightly larger than the space that was needed and therefore a redesign was required, however some of the early versions of the prints were taking just twenty minutes to print.   We also had the potential to either drill or reshape the design as the plastic could be modified.

This is an example of the basic design students have completed, with the issue on the left being the size of the insert which in this case is out by 2mm.   Even something as minimal as this has caused the part to be shown to be too large, and needing to be redesigned.    The other issue is that the gap in the object, shown left is rectangular shaped, and in the original object it is slightly off from this.

It has challenged our students to ensure that they are extremely accurate and have used the ruler function of the main Tinkercad interface.

Size: The prints are numerous (there are nearly thirty) however the size of the object needing to be fixed into place so generally as shown left they are 30mm long, 15mm wide and 20mm deep.

Timeframe: One of the reasons that this project was such a worthwhile one for the students that it was realistic to have the entire class attempt the task so we could the select the piece that best completed the brief (and we have identified a class prize for the winning entry that best works with the object).

What we would do differently/Next step for the students: It just remains to print the full set of prints, and then we are having a lesson where we will test the viability of each print to select the ones that best meets the purpose of the print.