Currently we’re having trouble getting our recycled plastic pieces to automatically grind in our Filabot so we manually have to use a small, 3D printed trowel to push the recycled pieces into the grinder. Since the triangular shape isn’t ideal for pushing, the team assigned Aaron and I to model a tool that would resolve this issue. The first idea was to simply make a damper, but Eunji pointed out that the shoveling aspect should be kept as we were also scooping pellets along with our small recycled pieces into the grinder.

The first idea was to combine both the trowel and damper as a triangular scoop with a flat square/rectangle at the bottom, but that led mostly to further complications rather than successful modeling. I thought about it a little more and figured it’d be better to have the scoop aspect mimic a loader’s bucket used in construction. It’d be able to scoop like a shovel and it has a flat end that would ideally push like a damper. Once I finished modeling it (pictured in the render above on the right), I uploaded the file to our Airwolf printer (with Aldrin’s help). The result (8 hours and 13 minutes later…) is what you see pictured about next to its 3D model!

As of now we haven’t had the chance to use it with the Filabot, but we’re happy with how it turned out and expect it to make our manual process a little easier once we do some more testing!