ColmP
18-01-2016, 13:51
Hi Everyone,
As part of our off-season work our team (1965) has spent some time experimenting with 3D printing. Last year we experimented with building a complete tank track to learn about how robust 3d printing could be. This was installed on a robot and displayed at the 2015 championships by PTC ( one of our team sponsors ). We created a blog for this: http://firsttechchallenge.blogspot.com/2015/01/3d-printing-for-first-teams-1-of-8_13.html
This was very successful for us and proved to be really robust. Therefore, we are thinking of using a version of this on our robot for Stronghold. Attached I have included the blog article and all of the models ( in PTC Creo ) for the tank track, drive sprocket wheel and the tutorials. Included in the doc is our BOM for the tank, we used a combination of parts from McMaster-Carr, AndyMark and BaneBots some of which have been discontinued.
There were some important lessons learned along that we documented in the blog. Hopefully, you will find this helpful. You should note that it will take quite a while for you to print out all of the parts for this. A single drive wheel ( the 2 parts ) took us 19Hrs, 25 of the threads took 20Hrs. We used the Makerbot Replicator 2 for this work.
You can find some videos on our team site (http://1965firebirds.org) and Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B3YMc6ShlsWNWk1FYVY2SmRGdWM&usp=sharing&tid=0B3YMc6ShlsWNY1VQTTdlUENqMTA)
Please let us know what you think and if you have any questions.
Good luck,
Colm.
As part of our off-season work our team (1965) has spent some time experimenting with 3D printing. Last year we experimented with building a complete tank track to learn about how robust 3d printing could be. This was installed on a robot and displayed at the 2015 championships by PTC ( one of our team sponsors ). We created a blog for this: http://firsttechchallenge.blogspot.com/2015/01/3d-printing-for-first-teams-1-of-8_13.html
This was very successful for us and proved to be really robust. Therefore, we are thinking of using a version of this on our robot for Stronghold. Attached I have included the blog article and all of the models ( in PTC Creo ) for the tank track, drive sprocket wheel and the tutorials. Included in the doc is our BOM for the tank, we used a combination of parts from McMaster-Carr, AndyMark and BaneBots some of which have been discontinued.
There were some important lessons learned along that we documented in the blog. Hopefully, you will find this helpful. You should note that it will take quite a while for you to print out all of the parts for this. A single drive wheel ( the 2 parts ) took us 19Hrs, 25 of the threads took 20Hrs. We used the Makerbot Replicator 2 for this work.
You can find some videos on our team site (http://1965firebirds.org) and Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B3YMc6ShlsWNWk1FYVY2SmRGdWM&usp=sharing&tid=0B3YMc6ShlsWNY1VQTTdlUENqMTA)
Please let us know what you think and if you have any questions.
Good luck,
Colm.