Husky 3D Printer group heads to the "Make it Labs" hack-space!

The Husky 3D Printing group headed down to Nashua, NH on Wednesday night to visit the "Make it Labs" hack-space (1 of only 3 in NH). Mr. Paul Hardin gave the students a tour of this unique "cooperative-style" space where people can rent their own space to come work on a variety of technology, mechanical, crafts, glasswork, pottery, and electronic projects. He shared his particular expertise in the area of 3D printing, and taught our students about how to run a commercial Maker-bot 3D printer. In these photos you can see Paul sharing the many objects he has created, and the Maker-bot printer itself. Below you will find the students reflections on the experience:

SOLOMON: I learned many things from our field trip. I learned that there are many commercial printers that you can buy, but they are very expensive. After seeing how the man printed little objects that help in his home, it made me want to buy a 3D printer to print my own little tools. But, after hearing how long it took him to make some little pieces it made me have second thoughts, as I don't think I would have the patience or knowledge to do it.

HOTARU: I saw the 3D printer that can make bigger and more complicated structures than ours. The process to print a structure is almost the same as ours, but their 3D printer does it automatically so it is so easy to print. The dragon that the 3D printer produced was so cool.

RIKAKO: There were many interesting machines. From the printing machines we could know the printing structure. One of the machines created objects from a thin thread, melting the thread and move to X,Y direction on a plastic platform. The 3D data comes from a memory card. The thread freezes with a constant temperature. This theory is the same with our simple 3D printer. Our printer freezes the yellow coagulation water through constant temperature, and we give the fever from the scanner's heat. I also learned that when we made the 3D image with an app, we should imagine how the figure is with height and depth in our head. This structure is very interesting for me and I learned some interesting things from the trip.

JAKE: I learned that the technology used in 3D printing is rapidly advancing, and today's technology could easily be outdated in a couple years.

NIKITA: The Field Trip went very successful, and I liked it - We have learned a lot about new 3D printing technology, which is a very important invention in today's scientific world. I liked the idea to be able to print unmoving parts with no effort, but the trip was too long.

IVAN: On Wednesday, our group went on a field trip to “Make it Labs” at Nashua, NH, and were given a tour by a scientist there who was interested in the 3D printer. He introduced the process of how his printer works and printed some examples with the printer. He also dropped some knowledge about the program for our model-making experience.

TIM P: I loved the whole area. I think that when I'm older I'll rent space in a workshop like that. I really liked that he told us about all the different details of how the dragon-head was made and gave us so much background information. I wasn't aware before this that you could 3D print in anything other than plastic.

HARRY: Mr. Paul is fabulious, he told us a lot of cool stUff about the 3d printer. He has a 3d printer, and he knows a lot about 3d printing. He can solve all of my confusion about 3d printer, such as how big can a 3d printing object be, can 3d printer print out color, how much does an ordinary 3d printer cost, etc. He also showed many of his masterpieces objects, they are really cool. The most impressive one was the bat-man ninja star, which was really, really, really cool. In summary, this field trip is one of the bst field trip I have ever been on.

FEDOR: I liked the idea that I could print most non-moving parts with virtually no effort.