We were tasked with designing and printing a model of a parametric bench. I chose to go the route of a traditional looking bench but still including a big enough spot to put backpacks underneath. It was harder than other designs because each piece of wood has a different sized hole cut out of it. One common idea from my research was that each bench had a design with flow and spaces in between each piece of plywood.
It was challenging to translate the design from the sketch on paper into a software like Onshape or Inventor. The measurements from piece to piece are very specific and easy to mess up. On top of figuring out the exact measurements I also had to figure out measurements for the pvc pipe going through the back and seat part of the bench. Once I got a pattern down it was fairly easy to keep it going to finish the bench.
Challenges
Since my design is so intricate for the printer that made it hard to make it work in the 3d printer. At first I thought the bench wasn't on the right rotation to be printed. So I rotated it and printed it again. The same outcome occurred where the printer got to the first PVC pipe and started freaking out. I didn't figure out the actual issue until I had tried to print my bench a couple times. The thing that was messing up my prints was the PVC pipe running through my bench, since it was hollow the printer was getting confused and didn't know how to print it out. So to fix this issue I deleted the hole running through the pipe to limit confusion on the printer. |
Setting up my design in maker bot was definitely easier than actually getting the printer to print it. Once I found the main issue it was easy to go ahead in MakerBot and set up the print file again, while also making it a bit smaller to further along the printer. So even though the printers threw me for a loop I figured out how to successfully print out my project with a few extra steps.
To summarize, I learned that you can take a simple item such as a bench and turn it into something unique. I also noticed that you can take one idea and have many different outcomes. Machines also tend to not work a lot of the time so planning in advance is key. Overall, this project was useful because I had to pull many different elements from different projects and put them together in a design that worked for the restrictions on my project.