Final Form
When I first opened Fusion 360 the first thing I wanted to design was a car but I soon found that to be a fairly tall order. Making a car is fairly straightforward in Fusion but making a car that looks good and doesn’t break the laws of physics and the laws of Fusion was a challenge. I set out to make physical forms from the sketches I had made in Fusion earlier in the semester. My goal was simply to physically touch a design for the first time. Seeing a 3D object in software is different from seeing it in real life. This is especially true with car forms or scultural shapes that have big sweeping curves. A car looks quite different when viewed at all the various angles that you are able to see it from when you are standing next to it. That was the main reason of doing this project. While I can’t afford to make full sized objects that would cost thousands of dollars to produce I wanted to make physical objects that would serve as visual references. I started out by making my first 3D print of a wheel on the Ultimaker 3 at the studio. With a little help I set up the print in Cura and was off and running. After speaking with Idea Forge about what was possible and the limitations due to their workload I decided to look for a 3D printer of my own.
I ended up getting an Ender 3 v2 for a pretty reasonable price and I ran it non stop for a few weeks. At first I had a lot of problems. I even wondered if I had a defective printer. I could not get prints to stick to the bed and if they would at first I would check back in an hour or two and come back to a ball of hair on the printer bed and a thick smell of burnt crayons. I learned about the importance of leveling the bed and getting the gap between the extruder nozzle and the bed as close to perfect as you can at all four corners of the bed. After looking around on the internet I was able to set my bed to the proper height and I was off and running again making prints. Around this time I asked Idea Forge about machining a wheel out of aluminum but they didn’t have the technical know how to achieve that so they sent me to the CU engineering department. After speaking with the engineering department I was excited because they were so slow due to covid that they were very interested in helping me produce a wheel. In fact my wheel design was somewhat of a hit over there and they asked if they could produce one to keep for themselves. I took that as a bit of high praise.
All in all I am very happy with where I am at the end of this process. I set out to print a car form, wheels and seats and I was able to achieve that. Having a wheel machined from aluminum seemed like it might be a bit out of reach at first. After three meetings with the Idea Forge it just seemed that they did not have that capability to machine a form this complicated on their 3 axis machine. But after seeing the response to my design when I showed it to a few people at the ITLP (CU engineering department) I was was all in on taking my best design and machining it as large as financially feasible. This project showed me what is possible after spending the time to dig deep into a new software. I really thought CAD software would be a little over my head and in many ways it still is. But I am able to use the tool to create what’s in my head and that is a powerful thing. Learning Fusion paid off in spades and it really is fun for me to use now. I spent a lot of time in that software and it served me well and I did not really realize that until I was holding these objects in my hand. I also think learning the additive process of 3D printing would not have been possible at this level without acquiring a printer of my own. I feel like I have a good basic understanding of that process now. I would like to get more first hand experience with the subtractive process but the equipment is pretty expensive and access to those machines is really quite restricted.
At the end of this process I look back at how far I have come in a fairly short time and I am pleased. It was just a month or two ago that I opened fusion for the first time and now I have quite a few physical objects to show for my efforts. I am looking forward to seeing what I am able to make next semester and beyond. I have a few goals in mind but you’ll just have to wait and see.
