As with every MNT project, 3D Modelling is an essential skill everyone learns and uses – partly to print cheap alternatives that have specific dimensions for what we want and partly cause its cool 😛 Now that we are fully in the construction stage, there’s surprisingly a lot of small miscellaneous parts we need to hold our machine together and we’ve been 3D printing these parts. We initially started out with using Autodesk Fusion 360 but switched to Solidworks as it had better simulation toolboxes (although we didn’t really end up doing simulations).

For the clamp I talked about in the previous post, we decided to create an arch-like clamp that the ice mold can fit into.The ends of the clamp contain holes for us to insert screws to screw it into the bracket. To match the bracket to the clamp, we had to reprint the bracket with holes that match the clamp’s holes for it to be secured.

 

Unlike what we thought, merely having exact specifications did not ensure that the ice mold would fit perfectly as there is a small margin for error and what we printed almost always ended up being smaller than the mold. Another big problem was that the ice mold had a very uneven surface which affected the fitting of the mold. We also decided that we needed to force the peltiers and water cooling blocks closer to the ice mold by inserting a backing into our clamp which would push the components together.

 

Round ??? of 3D modelling

A picture of our failed backing…..

We reprinted the clamps and backing over 8 times…  because there were always small errors with the measurements being slightly off and the ice mold not fitting nicely or the holes of the components not being aligned 🙁 Big props to shuchi for handling all these 3D modelling and having to fix each tiny detail of the modelling everytime it didn’t work :”)

 

A few of our failed 3D prints…

 

But also one of the highs! Printing this box to contain all our electronics which turned out really well and has two clamps to attach to the profiles on the side of our supporting structure

 

Back to more 3D modelling to hopefully print our final clamp and backing 🙂