Students and community repair volunteers recently had the opportunity to explore a novel way to create spare plastic parts for repair: 3D design and 3D printing.
This idea first occurred when coming across a number of snapped plastic parts as part of UWE Bristol’s Repair Café. The traditional way of using glue and epoxy resins was not always suitable or strong enough, and after a first successful trial of fixing a Soda Stream by replacing a broken seal with a new 3D printed version, the team behind the MAKERS project decided to explore 3D printing for repair more.
MAKERS (Making and Knowledge Exchange for Repair and Sustainability) aims to improve belonging for diverse engineering students at UWE Bristol, through developing connections with local Maker and Repair communities in the West of England.
Students and MAKERS community partners were invited to take part in a 3D design workshop led by Dr Joe Butchers, lecturer in Engineering Principles, to explore how the freely available and easy to use platform Tinkercad could be used, even by those with no relevant previous experience to create spare parts.
After practicing on some initial simple shapes and design, the group got to work on some broken sample parts, which had been sent in by members of the public to create a new part. As part of this, they successfully created a new plastic bracket for a 40-year-old baby cot.
The session was a great way to explore how 3D printing could be made more accessible to the wider repair community, and the team are now looking to run another one soon, giving the amount of interest from the repair community and students to learn more, and to work through some of the other broken items that were offered by members of the public to be fixed.
The team are exploring routes to run a workshop again and seeking funding for future training.