Over breakfast one morning Grant Schindler’s young son asked him for a remote control car, so he suggested that they use their 3D printer to make one instead. Grant’s son got his toy car, but he also ended up getting something far more valuable.
Grant Schindler is the creator of Trimensional, an app that pretty cleverly turns your iPhone into a simple handheld 3D scanner. So while he’s already a tech guy, he’s a self-described software guy, not a hardware guy. Creating this toy car with his son was going to be just as much of a learning experience for him as it was for his kid. All he had was his original MakerBot Replicator, a copy of open source 3D design program Blender and he and his son’s imaginations. What they came up with probably isn’t going to revolutionize the toy car industry, but it is an excellent example of how 3D printing can be a valuable tool for educating our children.
After drawing up some quick blueprints with pen and paper Schindler figured out how to make the car real one step at a time. His first step was locating a small DC motor on Amazon. After printing out and successfully testing his first set of gears with his new motor, he turned to Blender, a program that he was more familiar with than a full-on CAD program, to design the first car body.
He had initially intended to build virtual gears and test them out using the built-in Blender physics engine but he ended up not needing to as his first printed set of gears easily snapped together and worked with minimal post print tooling. The body itself was designed using simple shapes like cylinders, gears and cubes. He then converted all of the car parts into STL files and printed them out on his Replicator.
After some trial and error, adding an additional battery to give it some extra power and reprinting the car body a few times to achieve a tighter fit for the motor and gears, his son’s new toy car was born. And according to Schindler he and his son were thrilled with the final result.
“Since it keeps going and going forever, we chase it around the house, nudging it sideways as it’s about to hit some furniture or a wall. We were able to guide it into every room, crawling on hands and knees to keep up with it, all the while narrowly avoiding disaster.”
The lessons inherent in helping your child build something themselves rather than purchase things made by someone else are obvious. Grant is doing what all parents should do, opening his child’s mind to all available possibilities. And when those possibilities meet a 3D printer some pretty great things can happen.
You can read more about how Schindler created his 3D printed toy car here. He also shared his project on Reddit and talked more about his design process here and here. And of course you can download his 3D scanning app Trimensional from iTunes here.
