Team Printing - Developing the Torches
TEAM PRINTING - PROGRESS REPORT 2
From the perspective of the 3D printing group, the launch went very well. Since we had ultimately decided to print the torches in a flat disc rather than printing three rounded torches attached together, the print was very easy to attach to the payload. This made things very easy for launch day since no one had to worry about the torches possibly falling apart or completely falling off the payload. It also made it much easier to paint the torches to make them look more appealing to the eye. The paint was also necessary to read “Vires, Artes, Mores” on the torches to give them the finishing touch. Although many of the ideas we had originally planned to try never ended up happening, such as how we never even attempted to print the torches in a rounder manner, the final product still ended up looking very good and worked very well for the construction of the payload. If we had printed them rounder, finding a way to attach them to the payload would have been an entirely new and unnecessary challenge.
Some improvements that could be made to the 3D printed torches for a new launch include attempting to print the torches as three individual, rounder objects and attaching them could make the torches look more official. However, this would also bring a new challenge in for deciding how to attach these prints to the payload.
Another improvement that we had planned but ultimately didn’t do was to attach lights to the torches. We had several ideas for this stage, and it would’ve been fairly easy to do if we had stuck with a rounded torch design, but because we switched to the flat design it became much more difficult. We came up with an idea to reprint the flat design with small inlets where the lights could sit, but that also required us to figure out how to attach the wires and battery so that they wouldn’t be visible. This, along with the fact that we were almost out of time before the launch, led us to give up on the idea of using lights and to just paint the torches.
One of the challenges we were faced with was figuring out how to paint the torches so that they would be nice looking and easy to read. We had thought of painting the entire thing, including the outer ring, but we were afraid too many colors would make it much less visually appealing. After using Photoshop to look at a few possible coloring options, we decided on the simplest one. We only painted the words and the torches, because we thought leaving the rest of it white looked much better than painting it all. We also had the challenge of figuring what to use to paint the torches. We had considered using spray paint, but after deciding on a minimal color scheme, that wasn’t really an option anymore. We tried to use a sharpie to fill in the words, but it didn’t look right so we ended up using a small paintbrush to carefully go over everything. Overall, the torches turned out looking great even though we had to throw away a lot of our initial ideas.
