The sailboat that Julia made as her final project in Tinkercad is my favorite design so far this semester. She created the design for a professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department, Dr. Thelwell, who loves sailing. Julia performed a lot of her own research on the structure of sailboats in order to make her design as accurate as possible. The design was clearly very thoroughly thought out. Below is a picture of Julia’s initial sailboat design:
However, when the boat was printed this way, the pole holding the sail broke apart from the boat. Julia then updated her design by creating the pole and boat separately:
In order to make the pole attachable to the boat, the hole in the boat has a lock-in mechanism to turn the pole into the fastener and lock it in place:
This fastening mechanism also allows the sail to be turned slightly from side to side just as an actual sail would turn in order to change the direction of the boat.
She also decided to create the sails out of cloth and thread instead of printing them, which would make the sailboat fully functioning. This is probably my favorite aspect of the entire design. The cloth sails were cut out from an old t-shirt and attached to the boat by thread. The thread is meticulously tied in the exact places in which a sail would be attached to rope on a real sailboat. Thus, adding this cloth does not only make the sailboat functional, but it also makes the sailboat appear more accurate and “life-like”:
The boat is able to sail for an extended period of time and can be directed by blowing on the sails in the same way that an actual sailboat is directed by the wind. However, the boat eventually sinks due to the fact that the boat cannot be printed as “fully solid” on the Afinia printers.
Overall, this sailboat was very thoroughly thought out and very well designed. Julia put a ton of work into this project, and it is definitely my favorite design of the semester. I plan on using Julia’s .stl file to print one of my own!
-Channing Parker
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