Recently my girlfriend purchased a spinning bike and asked me if I could find a way to hang hand weights from behind the seat. When I first looked at the bike, I thought “Maybe I can just 3D print something that will do the trick?” I inspected the area under the seat and found that there was indeed space for me to mount an adapter plate. It was the perfect job for a 3D printer. So I took some measurements, drew up my first design in SolidWorks and printed my first iteration within an hour.
The adapter plate was easy enough, but I wasn’t sure how I would 3D print something that could withstand two hand weights hanging from it for a long period of time. I would need to print something that was very large and bulky in order for it hold that much weight. If I could only print those parts with metal…
I fell into the same trap that many of our customers fall into: thinking that 3D printing is the best and easiest way to produce a part you need.
While it’s true that 3D printing is a wonderful technology that enables designers in a way no other technology can, it isn’t always the whole solution to a problem.
I broadened my thinking to include other technologies and landed on a newer technology we work with – CNC wire bending.
https://vine.co/v/iduhq7IPFXQ/embed
If I could bend metal wires to allow the weights to hang on them, and clamp those wires into my adapter plate, I could make the entire assembly much smaller and more durable than if I had used 3D printing alone.
So in SolidWorks I altered my design to include 1/8” wires bent to the shape I wanted, exported that to the DIWire’s WireWaresoftware, and started bending!
No single technology was able to solve the problem in this case. By combining technologies with different capabilities, I was able to produce a durable, custom solution in matter of hours. This same idea can be applied to a variety of situations in the classroom, like when building robots, trebuchets, or other complex classroom projects.
