Exercise 15 Mechanical Design

Group Work

To see our group page, visit this link.

Personal Contribution

For our group project, I was tasked with designing accessories such as a knob and also for documenting the procedure we implemented and any issues we encountered. As you'll see, the part that I have documented for the accessories isn't very large because working on taking notes and pictures and overall documenting the group portion for both weeks was my primary contribution. I sketched then designed a knob in Tinkercad to turn one of the axles.

Before jumping in to the CAD process, I first sketched out my design on paper. Here you can see the three iterations, the last one being the final product. I used a caliper to measure screws and the axis of the machine to integrate into the knob.

I designed the knob in tinkercad. To do this I created a cylinder, turned it 180 degrees onto its side, then used the cylinder hole tool to put holes into the initial cylinder. I used a ruler which i placed at the bottom left hand corner of the plane and put the plane step at 1 mm. From there I saved it as a .stl file and uploaded it to my GD.

After designing it I opened it in Cura and 3d printed it in red PLA; it took a total of about 25 min to print. I then put in a screw and cut a wooden dowel to fit the hole.
There are a few things I could do to improve my design. Firstly, I could increase the outer circle diameter so that there will be a larger rotation, hence making it even easier to turn the knob. Also, I could put increments in mm so we could measure how much the axis is being turned. Another thing that could be done is smoothing out the knob once it is printed and also attaching something more durable than a wooden dowel (something made of metal perhaps) and also glue the piece in, not just relying on the space where it fits. So there are multiple steps I could take to make the piece better to help the overall function of the machine.

To download all my files click here:

stl knob file