3D Printed Mini Product: School Market Day 2025

 

Challenge: To support Market Day 2025 with additional products for save.

Background: While we've had a process involving our school Market Day with each group creating a specific product.   As we've had a number of pre-orders of significant personalised products which have been significant prints, however we would also like there to be general prints that are available.   

We have been looking at creations that have come from students in the classroom who have created a design that has potential to be a viable product for market day.   We are looking for something that could be produced that is relatively - one of the products that meets this criteria easily is the unique earrings that we have posted about previous, such as the 2023 Market Day business or the recent '101 Guide to 3D Printing: Earrings slideshow.

As we have a group that is working on unique key rings, we also discussed with them producing some generic designs that could be produced easily that would be able to be sold as stock.

The group had a brief discussion and then used Tinkercad to create a design, shown left.

Basic shape, basic generic name - which has been sunken into the design so that it would be more robust.  We have proven that examples such as this can last for a number of years without suffering any wear or damage such as the oversized sports shed keyring.  Designed and created by students in 2018 it is still in (daily) use at our school in 2025.   This has some wear but has maintained its integrity.   

To ensure that something different was also added for the print it was printed in 'super' glow in the dark filament, as a number of recent projects have been.

Level of Difficulty: Low - this was easily completed independently by the eight year old students in the classroom.  As per the brief the intention was to produce a simple design, and given this - the printer intended to be used was the Snapmaker (instead of the newer and  more advanced Bambu H2D was for the prints that would require more detail and a much faster printing time.

Size: The print is 80mm wide, 70mm high and is (in the second print/version) 10mm thick.   The first version which is the first photo shows the version that is 5mm wide.  The difference between the two is simple strength based - the second print would require significant force to damage, the former could conceivably be broken by applying (significant) force.     

Cost: The print requires 7.9m of filament which is 23.5g.   At present prices and assuming that a roll of PLA is full (1kg) 42 key rings could be produced from a single roll.   To ensure that the price could be met the students would need to have a charge of $1.00 per keyring to break even, and charging a larger price would result in profit.

Timeframe: The second more robust version took one hour and fifty seven minutes (on the Snapmaker) as noted previously if this was completed on the Bambu it would take half of the time, however as we have only one at school this is a good project to complete on the Snapmaker while the Bambu is otherwise engaged.

What we would do differently/next steps for students: To determine a price point for the product and therefore for the profit that they might potentially make.  As noted the print was completed deliberately using glow-in-the-dark filament.