The Javelin 3D Printing Education Solution Team comes to the rescue!

The Javelin 3D Printing Education Solution Team recently exhibited at the Connect 2016 conference last month in Niagara Falls, ON. We had a great time chatting with educators on how 3D printing can positively affect their students and school. We powered up our MakerBot and Mojo 3D printers throughout the day so Connect 2016 guests could see the 3D printing process firsthand.

Javelin’s booth at Connect 2016

Coming to the rescue

On the first show day, a gentleman visited our booth with a backpack that had a broken ladder buckle. The buckle was no longer holding his backpack strap in properly, thus rendering the backpack nearly useless and making it frustrating to carry around. Our innovative 3D Printing team saw a problem that could easily be fixed with the use of a 3D printer.

Designing the ladder buckle in SOLIDWORKS

Javelin 3D prints an on-the-spot solution

Our Application Engineer David Hayes pulled out his laptop and used SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software to design the buckle right at the booth. Once the file was created, David saved it as a .STL file.

A .STL file is the 3D printer equivalent of a PDF

The .STL backpack buckle file was then sent to our onsite Mojo and MakerBot 3D printers. In a little over an hour, we had 3D printed four functional ladder buckles!

As you can see, the 3D printers on display at Connect 2016 helped to immediately solve a problem. Imagine the on-the-spot solutions it could create in your classroom or workplace!