But while scrolling through the many great entries that sadly did not win, I stumbled on a familiar face and thought his entry was worth a closer look. I talked about Willem van Dreumel a few weeks ago when I wrote about the walking bug model that he designed for his grandchildren. For the Make it Float Challenge, van Dreumel created a solar powered rowing boat piloted by MakerBot Man and it’s a great little 3D printing project. Not only is it relatively simple to customize and assemble, but it has the added bonus of being educational and ideal for classroom settings. One of my favorite aspects of the summer challenges from Thingiverse are their focus on science and education.
The design also opens itself up to plenty of customization options, which is always important for those who are learning how to design working models. While van Dreumel has a figure of MakerBot Man piloting his rowboat, theoretically any similarly jointed figure could be put in his place. So if a student where to make their own rowboat they could insert an action figure, or even scan their own head and fasten it onto a movable figure body.
And, of course, the boat works. Well, it plods along at a nice, even pace that probably isn’t going to take it anywhere very quickly, but it works! Take a look at a video of the rowboat in action:
Van Dreumel designed his rowboat in OpenSCAD, and used two different printers to 3D print the parts. The larger boat components were printed on his Robo3D and some of the smaller, more detailed parts were printed on a Printrbot Simple. In total all of the parts sans MakerBot Man took about 12 hours of 3D printing time. The parts were all designed to require no supports or rafting, and require a very low infill, but the exact settings may need to be tested depending on your printer.
As for MakerBot Man, van Dreumel had to scale him down a bit to fit inside of his rowboat, so he was printed out at a scale of 1.5. He then chopped off his feet (ouch) in order to get him to fit into place properly, and glued his backside to the seat with some epoxy. All of the assembly and part details are on the Thingiverse page, as well as several more videos of van Dreumel’s boat in action.
Let us know what you think of all of the Make It Float entries and of course van Dreumel’s rowboat over on our 3D Print a Solar Powered Rowboat forum thread at 3DPB.com.