Purpose
My dear friend Ruben's birthday was fast approaching. At the time, I was an intern at the makerspace at Magellan International School, which is managed by the lead UTeach Maker mentor, Patrick Benfield. Since I was surrounded by so many useful resources and technology, I decided to make a birthday present for him instead of buying one. I immediately knew that I had to create something related to My Hero Academia, which is an anime that he really likes.
Design
As I browsed the web, I came across a 3D printed My Hero Academia logo on Thinigverse, which is a website dedicated to the sharing of user-created digital design files. I thought about 3D printing this to create a paper weight, but I decided to tweak the design to make it into a paper weight and a pencil stand.
I downloaded the file from Thingiverse and imported it into Tinkercad, which is an easy-to-use 3D CAD design tool. The change that I wanted to make was to create four cylindric holes at the top of the design big enough to fit pencils. This was not an easy task because the top of the design was slanted like a roof of a house. Because of this, I had to keep in mind the angle, diameter, and height of the cylinders. If my angles were off, the slant of the pencils would not match the slant of the design. If the diameter and height of the cylindric holes were off, the pencils would fall out of the pencil stand.
The final design can be seen below.
Response
Ruben liked it!
Reflection
The middle two cylindric holes intersect in the middle of the pencil stand. Because of this, if you put a pencil in each hole, they touch. Although this does not inhibit the object's function as a pencil stand, I would like to challenge myself to modify the design so that this issue is not present.
Additionally, I would change the color of the product. The turquoise color does not math the colors of the actual My Hero Academia logo, which features yellow, white, and red. I would change the filament to be yellow and paint the rest.
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