First Blog Post (Design Project): Hey! Our names are Cam and Cam, and to start we wanted to make a chess board with actual pieces that you could move. However, after some thought we decided that we should go the route of a fire truck/car. We want the truck/cars wheels to be able to rotate so we think that will be a problem for us. One other thing that we need to make sure of is that there is enough support to hold the wheels up.

It’s going to take time, but we believe that this idea will work in the long run.

Thingiverse Design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3132660

Second Blog Post (First Draft Print): At first we decided that we wanted to make an interactive chess board that someone could actually use, then we had the idea of making a moving truck/car, but we wanted to go more outside the box so we decided to make/design a working catapult. Here, we have our initial design for how we think the catapult will operate, we have a lot of support so we believe that the machine will be able to go through the motions of a catapult. What we learned from our first print is that it’s going to be extremely difficult to get the “generated support” off of our catapult so we can’t have it break, but we also need to figure out which tool to use to put in the middle that will act as the catapult itself.

Third Blog Post (Iterating The Design): As seen in our first post, we have the orange support beams going through the middle of our design, but we’re a little bit skeptical of how that will work. We might have to eliminate the beams to allow the catapult to work effectively, but we are still in the design stage so we have some work to go. If the beams are a no go, we will need to find a more efficient way to design this catapult. Also, as previously stated in our “First Draft Print” post we need to figure out the best way to incorporate the moving part of the catapult into the design so it has enough support to function.

Tinkercad Final Project Blog Post: We printed our catapult 4 different times and we have 3/4 prints to show you guys today. We first wanted to show you guys our initial design and what kind of problems we ran into. After seeing our first print not be successful, we changed a few things to try and make it work. We decided to make the structure larger and we hoped that this would allow for a successful print, but unfortunately the machine had other ideas and mis-printed one of our sides. Along with that mis-print, we figured out that we should remove the rotating balls and cylinders from the sides of our structure because we realized these objects would get in the way of our rocket and not allow for a successful launch.

Once we had this design ready we felt as if the idea would work, so we printed our structure for a third time. When we came back to the classroom a few hours later, we realized that the catapult was still not correct as one of the sides was a little screwed up still. Finally, we tried attempting the catapult one last time in the basement of Carrier, but the machine did not allow for a clean print to go through, so with all that being said we have our best print of the catapult and our rocket to launch for you guys.

I guess the main problem that we still don’t know is why the print wouldn’t go through when the design wasn’t an extremely complex one. In one of our prints, 3/4 sides printed perfectly, but then the machine tried to twist and turn our fourth side which screwed everything up. We tried twice on the LulzBot and twice on the Ultimaker, but didn’t make much of a difference in the end.

Thingiverse Link:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3132742