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.

Feb 10 / 7:17pm

William Morris would have used a RapMan...

Sam_0298

Crossing Boundaries - Art (and Textiles)

One of my D&T A level students also does Art. … and being Aaron Thorogood, one of the students who came to Euromold with us, he wanted to see if he could use 3D printing in his coursework project. So, I have to give him some credit for coming up with the idea of block printing.

I sent him away to design a block using Pro/Engineer (Creo Elements/Pro) reminding him to make sure that he “flipped” the image. A few minutes later Aaron had produced the first design and converted it to g-code with Axon. Of course this was far too easy… we found that the letters didn’t print well (too skinny) so this is where the ability to design iteratively with RapMan and BfB3000 is so valuable… Aaron produced design version 2.

Armed with some block printing ink and one of those rubber rollers that artists use for this sort of thing we inked the surface, placed the block  between some MDF scraps and a bit of leather… and squished it in a metalwork vice.

It works!!!!

Ok, we need to do some more development work on this and maybe do some research but it looks like Aaron has come up with a winning idea.

 

I then started thinking about next steps and what this block printing know-how can be used for…. And my mind has started to wonder about printing textiles. After all William Morris (English Arts and Crafts movement 1880 -1910) used wood block printing for his beautiful designs.

 

Maybe a topic for a new Teaching and Learning resource in the BfB wiki soon??