Rapid Racer

The need for speed; our inspiration

Bartholomew is a kid with two serious passions in life:

Watching the movie Cars on repeat
Believing with his whole heart that Lightning McQueen is the fastest thing ever.

After his 47th viewing of cars, Bartholomew had an idea. If Lightning McQueen could race forever on screen, then why couldn't he race forever in real life?

Print and Play's mission of making design and manufacturing accessible inspired us, 4 Wheel Drive, to design a simple car for amateurs to learn about 3D printing. They needed something that could be replicable and reliable to be printed. We wanted to make an approachable project that encourages play and learning.

Print and Play's mission of making design and manufacturing accessible inspired us to create something that wasn't just fast, but fun, approachable, and customizable for kids and anyone else obsessed with racing. They needed something that could be replicable and reliable to be printed

What it does

We created a 3D-printable car that could serve as the foundation for an introduction to 3D printing and for people who are passionate about racing and building.

Our design has efficient parts that have no supports and saves material. The total print time is under 2.5 hours for the entire car. This design can be easily assembled in a few minutes, and can the parts can be mass produced.

How we built it

The design has an intuitive setup with clear outlines of the shapes of the battery, motor, and wire connector clips, making it fast and easy to assemble, so you have more time to play!

The car also has an easily repeatable and customizable main body, which, in today's case of the "Lightning Car", has two Lightning McQueen lightning bolts referring to Bartholomew's favorite car.

We printed a spoiler for aesthetics and to improve the aerodynamics to bring speed. The spoiler also helps with weight distribution, and helps to resemble a race car.

Our car also has a hinge, that connects the front wing to the body of the car, which guides the car navigate around the corners of a track. Keeping a wide design, it helps to stabilize the car in the track, and the hinge allows enough space to make it around the curve.

In the end, we created more than just a car. It is a starter platform for creativity and hand-on learning. It reflects Print and Play's mission while keeping the experience engaging and accessible.

And somewhere out there, Bartholomew is racing his custom "Lightning Car" zoom around the track, living his passions.

Challenges we ran into and what we learned

During our design process, we ran into many obstacles we had to overcome with fitting our parts. We experimented with different tolerances and print settings to create tight fittings or loose fitting depending on the part. We learned the importance of dimensioning, manufacturing and testing. Overall, it was a lot of trial and error, which led us to realize how big a role prototyping and testing play in designing something.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ultimately, we are proud of how the car turned out, by working together given our limited time and resources. We're all glad to have optimally pushed ourselves in the past 24 hours, which refined our manufacturing and testing skills. All in all, we are happy with our working design that which meets all our objectives and constraints. We are grateful for have the opportunity to partake in this Designation we can all come together to unleash our creativity.