This week we familiarized ourselves with the 3-D printers in the Wet Shop.  Our assignment for the week was to make something that you couldn’t easily make by other traditional means.  Since we were not able to learn CAD like we previously planned on, we all went on a website called “Thingiverse” to find files that we could download and use to 3-D print.

Thingiverse is a really cool website, and it’s filled with endless ideas for 3-D printing.  After looking for a while I stumbled upon a small gearbox that looked interesting, so that’s what I decided to print.  Here is what the box CAD looked like:

I’ve never done any work with 3-D CAD drawings, so downloading this file and thinking that I was going to have to work with it was pretty intimidating for me.  Luckily, the extent that I had to change any of the files I downloaded was unzipping them to get the actual .stl file.

There are four 3-D printers in the Wet Lab, so part of our job was to figure out which would be the most appropriate one to use for whatever we were printing.  Since my object was relatively simple and didn’t have any complex geometries, I used the Dimension SST 768 printer.  We started the print at the end of class on Thursday, so everyone who needed to use that printer was getting their objects printed together.  Because of that, the print job took forever.  I knew 3-D printers took a while to print, but I didn’t realize just how long until this week’s assignment.

When I came back to the OEDK to get my parts, I found that they had conveniently already been through the solution to dissolve the support material.  So, all I had to do was bring the parts back to a table and try putting them together.

And here is the gearbox put together:

Unfortunately, the pieces do not fit together extremely well.  I’m not sure if this is because the .stl file wasn’t perfect or if it’s because of the printer, but either way this was a very cool assignment!