BfB, PTC and Scalextric
Two Blog posts in one day! Must be more good news!!!
Over the summer holidays I was contacted by PTC (the company who produce Pro/ENGINEER) about testing out some ideas for an international project that they support in schools and colleges. I couldn’t resist the challenge and the opportunities that it might offer for students.
The project is called Scalextric4schools (see http://www.scalextric4schools.org/ ). Basically students can design (using Pro/ENGINEER) and make scalextric slot cars to enter into an international competition. Tim Brootherhood from PTC was at the DATA Digital D&T conference and wondered if BfB printers could make a scalextric car body shell.. so he sent me the files to see if it was possible (btw the Makerbot guys had already given it a go but the size of their machines means that they can only produce the body shell split into parts). As you can see from the pictures in this post with a little help from the guys at BfB we printed a body shell with support materials (those of you who visit the BfB forum may have seen some of these before when I started a discussion about twin extruders and support materials).
So, If you are looking for a new project for your school or college you might like to consider taking part in this competition, full details are on the website mentioned above.
When I get all the parts to complete these cars I’ll post some more pictures. If you have a go please think about posting some photos on the BfB forum.
Dave
PS. If you are wondering about the strange looking red car in the photos it’s a printed mould for vacuum forming car body shells... another experiment that we are trying out.

