The 3D Printer Visit

In Kilteirnan national school a teacher named Brid Fenlon called in a favour from a friend. On Friday the 18^th a man named Noel Murphy came with a 3D printer to Kiltiernan NS. You might not know what a 3D printer is. Alright then let me explain. We all know a printer works *cough* hopefully *cough* I might as well explain it to you anyway. Now when you use your printer if you have a printer, it’s most likely an inkjet printer. The way an inkjet printer works is it uses extremely small drops of ink to create an image. The ink dots are really, really, really small, smaller than the diameter of a strand of human hair, which just so happens to be 70 microns. The dots are also positioned very, very, very, very, very precisely. Okay that’s the explanation on printing period. Now let’s explain the 3D printing shall we? So you put on a USB key what you want the 3D printer to create and the 3D printer will take the material you choose, preferably plastic, and heats it up to fuse the material layer by layer by layer for hours and hours and hours to build you a three dimensional object. When Noel Murphy brought in the printer he called us all into the class room to explain how a 3D printer works. Then he passed around an elephant he made using the 3D printer. It had holes in it so it wasn’t really a whole elephant. It was more of a… Swiss elephant. Then he called us all into the halla and told us that we were going to make a whistle that we could keep. So we sat on the benches waiting for our aisle to be called to come in, so we could take turns getting to see the 3D printer IN ACTION. By the second lunch time (which was a few hours later) the whistle was done printing. It was yellow and plastic. The first kid that got to try out blowing the whistle was Daniel, the youngest kid in the school. And it worked perfectly. It was really cool. After that we all went back to our class rooms, Noel Murphy took the 3D printer and all of his figurines back and that was that. If you ask me it was real nice of Noel Murphy to bring in a 3D printer. I really enjoyed his visit and I hope that everyone else in Kiltiernan NS did too.

 

BY: Erin