3D Printing At Discovery Charter School – Part 3

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By David Lewis

The Rapman 3.1 is alive and printing as the Discovery Charter School CAD/CAM Lab gains another key element. On Thursday evening, after final adjustments and a lot of reading, the DCS Rapman 3.1 came on-line.

We started printing test rafts. We eagerly watched the first set of test rafts get printed as the RapMan buzzed, whirred and hummed along. In just a few minutes we had our first product.

Looking at the rafts, it was clear that some fine-tuning was going to be required. The raft in the lower left position for instance looked just a little funny under closer examination.

As predicted in the documentation, the raft was “curly” indicating that the table needed to be raised a bit.  So we made some adjustment and got a better result. Notice only a bit of curl at the lower left.

The result is one happy Riley who is very anxious to start moving his SolidWorks designs through Skeinforge and into G-code that the Rapman can interpret. Riley, Vernon and several other students have summer plans to design and print (build?) a number of projects ranging from a cover for the 25 pin connector through airgun pellets designed for underwater use. Given the tools that these middle schoolers have at their disposal, I don’t think there is too much in the way of limits in their way. We will post some additional examples as designs get coded and printed.

Part 4 >>