3D Printing: Barn Printing Replacement

Challenge: To replicate or replace the broken parts to a farm barn toy building using their iPads, Tinkercad and 3D Printing.

Background: Last year we had a major school project - the Dolls House where the students spent a year remodelling the furniture for a play set.   You can click on the link here and view the summary from last year.

This year as we have noted the focus is on the barn play set as originally detailed here.    Recently we've started zeroing in on various aspects of the design with a focus on the doors.   As part of this process the students were heavily involved in using measurement and measuring in centimetres and millimetres.    Students used a variety of rulers and measuring tapes.

Students also used the Tinkercad App to AR/VR to test the viability of the design by projecting it into the place where it was to be placed.   In this instance shown left the orange door is the virtual version - the 3D Printed version is the top photograph on the right hand side.

Level of Difficulty: Hard - while the door is simple and straightforward the hinge is something that the students need to master and is proving very problematic.   We have looked at the doors in the classroom and used other examples - looking at the shapes and the design and how the door works in relation to the hinge.  The size of the design proved to be excellent for this task.   Printing the door was relatively straightforward and the time was easily completed.

Size: The print was 60mm wide and 70mm long.   The print was 4mm thick.   The hinge at the top left and the top right of the door needs a small adjustment.  It needs a small adjustment with its width to ensure that it can operate with the hinge successfully.

Cost/Price: The print used 21g of PLA to complete.   This had a price point of $0.54c.   Regular PLA was used for this task as it was completing a door and could be colour matched with spray painting or having 'barn door colour'.

Time: The print took forty one minutes to complete.  This included the time to heat up the printer and have the print set itself up.

Wheat we would do differently/Next steps for the students: The issue is again with the hinge and the ability of this door to swing in and out.   The students were successful with the measuring part of the task as were the majority of the classroom.   As we have mentioned we are going to use electronic callipers moving forward for accurate and detailed measurement.

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.