Rapid Prototyping Saves the Day for Dad

One of the greatest things about working here at TriMech (outside of Bagel/Donut Day on Friday) is the exposure to a wide variety of tools. From the Entire SolidWorks Suite of tools to the 3D Printers and PDM Systems, we get to work with a lot of cool technology. Professionally, it's great exposure. Personally, it can bring some benefit too.

Case in point, My daughter has a battery-powered truck she inherited from her older brother.

She was driving the truck around on Saturday when I heard it making an awful crunching noise. Apparently, it's been doing that for a while. I did some investigative work and determined the problem to be a stripped gear in the gearbox. It was missing 7 teeth along the outside. Thinking that I couldn't readily run down to Lowe's or Home Depot and pick up a power wheels rear end gear, I thought I would utilize the tools around me to find a solution to this devastating problem.

On Sunday, my 8-year old son and I took the bad gear and sat down with a pair of calipers; we modeled up a replacement gear utilizing SolidWorks 2011 and saved the file out as an STL. On Monday morning, I used the Fortus printer we have at TriMech to run a replacement gear. We happened to have a blue color cartridge in the machine, which makes the picture showing the replacement gear even easier to visualize.

The Blue gear was inserted into the train and it fit beautifully on the first try. I added a little grease, sealed it back up and had the truck running within 15 minutes. Although this was a personal use of the technologies we sell and support at TriMech, it's very indicative of the way we should be utilizing existing technology as Engineers to make better products and to cut down on LONG production cycles.

And now the kids think I can fix about anything...added bonus.