rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

Apr 22 / 2:45pm

3D printing and Scalextric for Schools

(download)

Quite some time ago with the help from the guys at Bits from Bytes (3D Systems) we did some experimenting with PTC for the Scalextric in Schools competition (there is a post about this earlier in this blog).

We printed body shells and vacuum forming moulds for Scalextric cars. This proved to be very successful and Tim Brotherhood from PTC displayed the parts at the D&T show... Anyway, not having a laser cutter at the time I couldn't make the chassis, so the body shells went into storage. Tidying up my study the other day I came across the moulds again and decided to have a go at assembling a car.

I took the files into school and cut out the parts for the chassis and spent an hour or so assembling it. It's a lovely bit of designing as it is all held together with a single bolt! I also vacuum formed a new body shell and cut off the excess material and wheel arches... Hey presto, a fully working Scalextric car! Maybe I'll get round to adding windows, decals and "go faster stripes" someday.

I have also used our 3D Touch printer to print out a new body shell... Being a bit over excited I broke the last one when I ham fisted tried to remove the support material from inside... Oops! So this time I'll see if I can get the guys at Bits from Bytes to dissolve away the support materials with one of their fantastic new ultrasonic tanks, but perhaps that's for another day.

Now I'm wondering... How can I get hold of some track? Maybe then I will try to get a team of students together in school to enter the competition!