As a part of the Formula Student project, I was tasked with designing and making a trophy for our faculty advisor who was reitiring after 10 years supporting the Formula Student teams at Portsmouth. I was given a total of only 2 weeks for this project from start to finish, and as we're poor student I was trying to achieve it on minimum budget.
I really loved this challenge, as it was a chance to give back to the member of staff for all their support, and they were incredibly happy and grateful for the trophy! (Which I am told sits on his fireplace to this day!)
The plan was to utilise one of my 3D printers to print out two scaled models of the Formula Student cars from that year, and fix them to a base with a plaque.
During this experience I learned a lot about slicing large models for 3D printing.
Since there is a lot of small parts in the assembly, it was necessary to remodel parts as solids of significant thickness. A good example of this is the chassis tubes that have a wall thickness of 1.2mm in 100% scale, so when scaled down they have walls too thin to print.
This was fixed by making them solid, and ensuring that pieces like the main roll hoop were printed as seperate pieces to make it easier for the printer, and stronger with layer direction.
Another issue was several pieces overlapping, whihc resulted is parts cancelling out and venishing once it was converted into a .stl file. The fix here is relatively obvious, and care was taken to bring the model back into the files.
Something that I also experimented with here was changing the nozzle size to suit what I was printing better.
For the cars I used a combination of 0.2mm and 0.4mm nozzles which provided the detail that I wanted, however increased the priting time.
For the base of the trophy I used a 1.2mm nozzle that allowed me to put down a lot of material in thick layers, which significantly reduced the printing time.
Once the slicing was completed, the printing of the parts was relatively straight forward, and luckily incident-free!
The prints needed a lot of finishing on the bodywork sections to make them smooth, and the models were fixed together with CA glue and a soldering iron.
For filling the parts, a combionation of CA glue and baking powder was used and the sanded down once dried, allowing me to fill in some of the gaps from printing relatively quickly and easily.
These parts were all then printed and assembled to make the final trophy.
I was very happy with the final product based on the 2 week timeframe, and the minimal budget that was used.
The models looked great, and using only 4 colours I was able to make them look very similar to the actual cars.
The plaque was simply ordered on Ebay and glued on to the base.
Overall the budget for the trophy was around £21 including all paints, brushes, glues, filaments and the plaque - and for this sort of budget it is definitely the best gift we could have given him.
The faculty advisor was very happy with the result, and we held a meal for him where the trophy was presented to him. Most of the team hadn't seen it before this point and commented on how good it was, which was great to hear!
If I had to do it again, I would like to spend more time getting the base finished as some print lines were still visible here, however I learned a lot from this experience, and thoroughly enjoyed it!