Additive Manufacturing
A Never Ending Project
Ever since the first 3D printer was advertised and put onto the consumer market, I have been in love with the idea of additive manufacturing. About a year after the first 3D printers began to be available to the average consumer, I saw my first one in real life. It was at my dad's companies offices, and it was mesmerizing. After watching it print out plastic bracelets all day, my mind began to roam. I thought to my self, "what else can I tell this machine to print?" That was just the beginning of a hobby that I have kept interest in ever since.
3D Designing
Ever since seeing that first bracelet come off of the build plate of the original Maker Bot replicator, I had been searching for software that would allow me to create my own designs. In eighth grade, I found Tinker Cad. Tinker Cad is a simplified version of programs like Auto Cad, or Fusion 360, which allows kids to create their own 3D designs. After discovering this program, I spent the next year learning the ins and outs of Tinker Cad and designed hundreds of projects, all of which could be printed on a 3D printer. The next step for learning more about 3D design was to graduate from the basic program of Tinker Cad to the more advanced and much more precise, Fusion 360. With this new and much more powerful program, I could build things that were perfectly measured down to half a centimeter and could be assembled like plastic molded and manufactured parts.
My Designs
Now that I was pretty fluent in two of the most capable 3D design software in the world, I began to design some amazing parts. First, I started training my self on design precision and tool use, by using google earth footage of buildings such as the White House and redesigning them, to scale, in Tinker Cad or Fusion. The skills I learned from re-creating so many famous buildings, lead me to a project in which I made a scale model of my school's entire campus. Next, I moved on from just copying and scaling down items, to really creating my own projects and ideas. My favorite example of a project that I built from my own design, is a type of puzzle that I built. At the time I designed this, I was also interested in the worldwide game of Geocaching. Geocaching is basically a public worldwide treasure hunt that anyone can participate in. People hide creations in the woods, and post the coordinates of the Geocache online, for other people to use to find the hidden item. Even though I loved finding these hidden gems, I was even more interested in creating my own. This is where 3D printing comes in. Using Tinker Cad, I designed a thing that looks like a birdhouse. However, it is not a birdhouse. In fact, it is a puzzle box, which a Geocacher would have to solve in order to reach the prizes inside.
