Mar. 22, 2015 | By Alec
While desktop 3D printers are fantastic machines for building parts with theoretically unlimited potential, most of us simply print toys and replacement components for whatever breaks around the house – all objects that usually easily fit on the print bed and only consist of two or three separate components. But then there are some people who take things a bit further than that and work on huge projects just because they can. Remember this 3D printed replica of the Eiffel Tower?
Well this crane, that has been built by Australian engineering student Samuel Ashfort and his fellow students Karl, Charlie, Amanda, Chris and Rob, falls in a similar category. As Samuel explained to 3ders.org, this project was actually completed way back in 2012, but he has only now gotten round to sharing it with the rest of the world. The goal of the project? To build a device that could lift things from point A to point be. "You could apply pressure in certain places on the 'map' and the whole thing was to not use more than a certain amount of power to do the job. The final constraint was that it was to be not capable of more than it had to be, ie not be over engineered," Samuel told us.
And a luffing pin jib crane was an obvious choice for master tinkerer Samuel, who even operated and repaired several actual cranes before going off to university. While a group project, the others decided to give Samuel as much design freedom as he wanted because that’s just simply what he does; he even called himself a high functioning autistic. "I am a high functioning autistic, I breath idea's, eat idea's, dream idea's, idea's give me insomnia. […] This team really gave me such a free reign to go nuts with this design, they were awesome but ultimately most of the design is me, they just did the 'hard bits' like writing the actual reports that got us the perfect grades."
What he came up with is a truly remarkable and ambitious crane. After 15 iterations using Autodesk FEA, the final concept consists of 189 parts, about 20 unique sketches and another twenty variables that have been parametrized to a spreadsheet. Everything has been 3D printed in ABS plastic, as Samuel felt that PLA is just too weak and brittle for these kinds of projects. "There was probably 2 weeks of printing there, about 12 big plates? I know one of the prints took 243 hrs as it's a record I have still not beaten again within my lab," he says. As he explained when presenting the crane, warping haunted the entire process. The baseplate alone consists of several parts which suffered horribly from warping. After lots of swearing, hours and hours of lost time and half a dozen of failed parts, Samuel finally got to a point of being satisfied with it.
All of these parts have been 3D printed on Samuel’s own homemade 3D printer, which largely resembles a Prusa Mendel model built from MakerGear parts, that he made a short while before this project. "I only just got it to the point to make stuff like this about four months [before]. I wanted to recreate the entire process of designing a luffing crane," he says, adding that the printer still works. "It still runs and is one of my primary printers. I have since designed my own printers and upgraded revisions for the different types many times over. Nothing of the original prusa remains," he told us.
Really the only things that haven’t been 3D printed are the parts that ensure movement: "a few m8 threaded rod shafts, 608 bearings, the cast acetal gears in the gearboxes and the 2mm stainless shafting in the gearboxes, also the .5kg fishing line used for rigging and I suppose the copper and motors."
And as you can see in the video below, the whole thing works great and is capable of supporting quite a bit of weight. For the competition it was originally intended to lift at least 0.5 kg at a boom angle of 70 degrees, though it took quite a few iterations to get that far. "Suffice to say it underwent a heavy material stress analysis followed by computer simulations of failure," he explains. Eventually adding a cross sectional area to the boom section ensured that it could lift heavier loads, though even then it would buckle under the weight of heavier tasks. To ensure that his 3D printed parts could stand the pressure, Samuel first tested several layering techniques and tensile tested them to see how much they could handle.
But even now, more than two years later, it still works just fine. "After the competition I fixed it and upgraded it, I remember lifting 5kg at 3m with it, though it is more brittle not due to the passage of time. I even made a 'skill tester' claw for it so you could pick up things with it. I used it for a while to play with our new kitten and it could hold his weight easy, he's grown now so it's just a cool toy in my lab until the day I can use it to teach things to my son."
These type of projects perfectly illustrate what 3D printing is capable of. You don't need thousands of dollars’ worth of machinery to make something new and original, you just need a good idea. Just look at Samuel: "3D printing is a big part of what I do because it enables me, the guy who can’t get funding, to beat the rich people with funding."
Some of the Samuel's previous work
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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Hey, I forgot, there was also Chris. Sorry Chris it has been a while and I had forgotten you were in this project.
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