For the 3-D printing project I chose to make a coin holder. I chose this because my dad always keeps his change on the floor of his car and I wanted to make some type of storage container for him to easily keep his change together. I chose the circle design so he can store the container in his cup holder of his car. The cut out half-circle edges were added for looks, it adds to the design and makes it more creative. The coin holder stores quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.
I did research before I was able to design my coin holder on Inventor. I looked up the dimensions of each coin and did calculations to see how wide the circles needed to be and how tall my object needed to be.
Final inventor sketch
When I finished my sketch on Inventor, I saved the file as an STL file and opened it in MakerBot. I selected my small figure on the screen, then clicked the red highlighted box in the image pictured to the left. I changed the blue highlighted dimensions to 1000% and pressed enter. I checked the conversion and my coin holder is now ready to print because it is the size I want it to be.
Here is the print preview screen on MakerBot. The time estimated to print was 6.5 hours so I picked it up after school that day.
Here is what the 3-D printer looks like when I was printing my coin holder.
final product:
Here is the final product with some coins placed in the holder showing its success.
summary
While doing this 3-D printing project I learned how to be creative while designing the required projects in this class. I like how I added the extra half-circle cutouts for an extra creative design. I also improved my skills on the Inventor program. The more I use it, the better I get.