Kevin Brasil's Blog

The semester has finally come to an end! Our last set of presentations occurred during these two weeks. This semester has been very productive for the small scale track team. I feel really good about the direction we are headed with our design and the progress we have made. I am grateful that the members of my team are willing to put in a little bit of team over the winter intersession to get our project moving forward. Our goal is to stay ahead of the game to lighten our load for the following semester. Happy Holidays!

My main focus during our rapid prototyping stage was regarding the 3D printing of the hangar brackets. I took on this challenge since I own a 3D printer and always have access to it. Our design requires 60 hanger brackets to be produced. Each hanger bracket takes 6 hours to print with a 0.4 mm nozzle. I decided to step this up to a 0.8 mm nozzle and I was able to cut print time in half! That is 360 hours of 3D printing down to about 180! This process was not as easy as just switching out the nozzles of the printer. A lot of time went into re-calibrating the printer with the new nozzle and dialing in the correct settings on the slicing software. After multiple failed prints I had found the perfect settings. A reduction in print speed, as well as changes to the nozzle diameter, layer height and infill gap settings were all necessary to produce successful prints.