When Scott Houtchens, BSEN ’16, got the assignment to create a simple gear assembly for his 3D printing class, inspiration struck.
“Our design goal was to create something that contained interlocking pieces and moved,” he says. “I decided to take a creative route.”
Houtchens’ creativity came to him in the form of a bird, one that would flap its wings when a lever was pulled.
Scott Houtchens, BSEN ’16 (Photo by Greg Abazorius)
“I was sitting on my couch at home and it just came into my head,” he recounts, adding that he quickly sketched a design on paper before entering it into Solidworks, a three-dimensional software design program.
The entire process took only a matter of hours. Houtchens brought the design the next day to his professor, Steve Chomyszak, and they headed to the Manufacturing Center. The 3D printing process took roughly a day, followed by two days of soaking the bird in a chemical bath to remove excess plastic.
Chomyszak believes projects like Houtchens’s perfectly combine ingenuity with creativity while using a cutting-edge technology.
“3D printing is important because it allows all students from various engineering disciplines to partake in the making aspect of learning,” says Chomyszak. Says Houtchens: “If you can think it, you can print it.”
—Greg Abazorius
