My daughter and I wanted to create a 3D printed watermill.
One of the biggest design issues was how were we going to “Glue” the pieces
together. We wanted to avoid using
screws and/or glue if possible and see how much we could actually “Print”. Some of the pieces we could have been combined to
print in place however some of the other ones (like the beam that went from the
water wheel to the motor) were simply too big to print in one piece. After some thought we decided to order the
Kuman 3D drawing pen and use that to “Glue” the parts
together.
I was very pleasantly surprised with how well this idea
actually worked. We did some initial tests
as shown in this first video and the pieces stuck together quite well.
Next we glued the pieces together. This video shows how we glued the ballbearing
to the ballbearing mount:
The key to using a 3D pen to “Glue” your pieces together is: You need to be real quick because the filament cools in a matter of a second or
two. When we glued the sides of the
water wheel to the water wheel itself we had to extrude the filament as fast as
the pen could push it out and only put the filament in one small strip on one
side but that little bit holds the sides in place stronger than any glue that I
have used.
The following video shows the watermill in action:
I submitted my watermill design to the mechanical design
competition on Pinshape so you can find the STL files here: https://pinshape.com/items/36164-3d-printed-3d-printed-watermill
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