Final Prototypes from Making Things

The last two weeks of the spring semester belong to BADM 331, Making Things, taught by Professor Aric Rindfleisch. Teams arrive with final prototypes, and the requests get noticeably more specific than they were in February.

Five Teams, Five Different Demands on the Lab

What made this stretch interesting was not the volume but the range. Each team had arrived at a different technical requirement:

• One team's design was a working mechanism, with wheels, levers, and a housing. They asked for the moving parts in one color and the case in another, so the mechanism reads clearly at a glance. It ran across two Ultimakers.
• Another team needed flexible filament, using new stock that Professor Rindfleisch brought in, and the part was large enough that it had to go on our big-format printer.
• A third specified transparent PETG at a 0.4mm nozzle, on one particular machine, and nothing else.
• A fourth wanted their final prototype sliced at 0.25mm layer height for a finer surface finish than a standard draft print gives you.
• A fifth needed their clip design in five colorways, with supports, essentially a product line rather than a single object.

The Best Part: A Team That Tested First

The clip design team did something we wish more clients did. Before committing to the full multi-color run, they came into the lab and asked us to print a single pair on an Ultimaker, just to see whether that machine could hold the geometry at all. We printed one, sent progress photos, and only then moved ahead with the rest.

They came back later to rescale the design to 81% of its original size. That is exactly the loop the course is trying to teach: print, hold it, learn something, change it, print again.

Why Material and Color Are Design Decisions

It is easy to treat filament choice as an afterthought. These prototypes show why it is not. Flexible filament changes what a part can do. Transparent PETG changes what a reviewer can see. A two-tone print communicates which parts move. A five-color run turns one object into a range. Each of those is a product decision, made at the printer.

Teaching a course with a build component? Talk to us about supporting your students in the lab.