On a small table sits what appears to be a hollowed out microwave, making whirring sounds as an arm extended over its top moves in a rectangular shape. As time goes on, that shape becomes larger and larger, built from the bottom up
That hollowed out microwave, though, is anything but a kitchen appliance.
It’s a MakerBot Replicator 2, a 3D printer, and it’s printing a plastic, prototype mini pizza oven.
The oven is a project by John Herbert, a senior studying mechanical engineering, who is creating his oven with Ohio University’s 3D printers with hopes to bring pizza ovens to people who do not have space for large conveyor ovens in their businesses or homes.
“I’m just trying to make something quick and dirty I can make and test,” Herbert explained. “I could probably do it faster (and) it would probably cost me a lot more in terms of materials and tooling if I want to go to my department’s machine shop and make this out of steel.”
The printer’s costs start around $2,199 on the MakerBot website, but the materials, Herbert said, are cheap, which makes working with the printer worth it.
The 3D printer Herbert has been using to construct his oven is one of two in Putnam Hall, housed on the second floor, called The Create_space.
The printers use a plastic material made from polylactic acid which sits on a spool connected to an arm that revolves around whatever object the printer is creating.
Farther off campus, at the Innovation Center, 340 W. State St., is a printer that works on a much larger scale. That printer is a Stratasys Objet350 Connex. It’s much larger than the desktop printers at The Create_space, and uses a liquid plastic instead of the spools of plastic the MakerBot uses.
The Stratasys Objet350 — bought for $250,000 by entities including the School of Art + Design, the Russ College of Engineering and Technology, and the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine — is intended to be used for “student art and engineering design projects” and small businesses that wish to manufacture small-scale products.
Jesus Pagan, assistant professor of engineering technology and management, said that students, faculty and businesses will be able to use the printer, and that it would create bridges between different departments and schools within OU — an idea that is also reflected in the smaller operation at The Create_space.
“We’ve got all these different people, with all these different interests from all these different disciplines doing these things here,” said Nathaniel Berger, operations coordinator of The Create_space. “So I want to make sure that we keep the access really open. … We have a price structure set for students that want to come in and do it which is extremely cheap.”
For Herbert and his pizza oven, this meant that the use of the MakerBot kept things cheap for him — one of the most recent pieces he printed was a little more than six dollars, Herbert said.
Other 3D printer projects at The Create_space include making pieces for sculptures, molds for jewelry and, as in the case of Phillip Johnson, printing replicas of human ears to create what is called binaural sound.
Johnson, a first-year graduate student studying sound design, said he became fascinated by binaural sound and wanted to recreate it using a binaural microphone after seeing it in a YouTube video.
“You’re basically recording two different locations at the same time through stereo,” Johnson said.
The only way to make that work, Johnson said, is to make it as if a human were hearing it, which led him to making a replica of his own ears, so they can be mounted and equipped with mics to hear as he does.
Across campus, chemistry and physics students are using another MakerBot in the Clippinger Research Annex for lab work.
Helen Cothrel, a junior studying physics, helped set up this MakerBot midway through the summer and now she uses it to help make items that could be used in the lab.
Cothrel said while the printer is used for lab work, it’s easy to operate.
“It’s not some super crazy huge piece of technology, it’s actually a desktop printer,” Cothrel said. “All you have to do is you need to have the object that you want to print — which they call a ‘thing’ — and you have the ‘thing’ in a 3D file format.”
A “thing” is used from files made from computer animated drawing programs, which Cothrel said can be more expensive programs or free programs like Blender or Google SketchUp.
MakerBot has its own software, MakerWare, and a website of templates users have made, known as the Thingiverse, where files can be uploaded and then downloaded, all ready to be printed.
And even though Cothrel has worked with the printer since the summer, she said it still feels new and interesting.
“It’s like watching something being pulled out of thin air, and even though logically you see it, you see the nozzle and you know the material is there, it still feels like magic every time,” she said.
ds834910@ohiou.edu
@drussell23
