And yet it still works as advertised, no pitfalls

Jan 26, 2015 15:44 GMT  ·  By

Usually, whenever I cover some cool gizmo or mechanical contraption that was 3D printed, it's a case of 3D printed in stages. The contraptions are 3D printed piece by piece and only assembled later.

I have finally come upon an aversion to this trend, and what an amazing aversion it is! The “Make Something That Moves Something” theme has definitely been lived up to, and then some.

See the gearbox in the video embedded below? And the attached gallery? Yes, it was 3D printed in a single run, fully assembled.

The story of the gearbox is quite interesting. Stratasys basically enlisted a whole student class to make things that would later be assembled into a single structure.

Senior Mechanical Engineering student Carmelo Locurto chose the center piece, the module that would drive the others. He planned to base it on a large ring gear and a set of planetary gears, but he never managed to get the right tolerances between the planetary gears large enough to be 3D printed and assembled into a working device.

Eventually, he scrapped the whole idea and used a five miter gear design.

The final object was printed as a single item and has a top miter gear driving a miter gear located below, which in turn drives the last two gears in the box. The gearbox has windows so you can see the inner workings.

How did he manage to print the whole thing? He used support material which he later washed away with a dissolving solution.

It's a shame that some of Locurto's classmates didn't meet the same success with their designs. There was no assembly to, well, assemble once everything was said and done.

The 3D printed gearbox (3 Images)

The 3D printed gearbox
The 3D printed gearbox, front viewThe 3D printed gearbox, angle view
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