What’s the very latest variant of pinewood derby that 3D printing now offered us? How about the car racing fanatic’s “crash-to-win” printable car challenge!
IDSA Launch Day 3D Printed Car Challenge, via Inventables:
The Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) is a non-profit association of professional designers. Each year their big event is their annual conference. At the 2013 event Inventables teamed up with Paul Hatch the conference chair, Computer Aided Technologies, Stratasys, Models Plus, and The 3D Printer Experience to put on a 3D printed pine wood derby contest called Launch Day.
The race was captured by 6 cameras strategically mounted around the track. We even had one camera at the top of the track and one in the crash zone getting slow motion coverage of the action.
Models Plus built a 6′ track that was modeled after a Ski Jump. The purpose of the contest was to give Industrial Designers the chance to really flex their design muscles with 3D printing technology. In addition since this years design conference theme was “Breaking the Rules” we opened up the entries to designers from all over the world. This meant you didn’t need to be in the IDSA and you didn’t need to be attending the conference. We thought this was an interesting twist because the combination of low cost digital manufacturing tools and crowd funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo it is really changing who can be a designer and manufacture a product.
In order to challenge the designers Inventables offered up three 3D printers as prizes to the best car in each of the following 3 categories:
- Best flight (farthest distance traveled)
- Best crash
- Best looks
