Prototyping Time! By Karina M.

The Scarlet team is finally in the prototyping phase of our pediatric wheel project! A week prior, Scarlet had a team meeting with Ms. Meisner to go over our design proposal. During the meeting, Ms. Miesner pointed out some essential items that we needed to revise in order to start brainstorming what our next steps were going to take in prototying. These tips were what we based on our first team meeting last Monday. The first item that we needed to hammer out was deciding whether we were going to make a large scale prototype or scale down and make a 3-D small prototype. The second item was the dimensions that we were going to use. By the end of the meeting we decided that we were going to make a small 3-D prototype, and when we were done with make that prototype, we would start making the large pediatric wheelchair. Also, we decided that we needed to solidify the dimensions that we wanted to make the pediatric wheelchair by the end of the week. That same day, two of the Scarlet team members went to the nurse’s office and took measurements. They also took some pictures.

 

From these photos and looking at other pediatric wheelchair designs, we decided for the large scale pediatric wheelchair that the overall height would be 35 inches, the overall width would be 17 inches, the large wheels in the back will be 2o inches, and the front wheels will be six inches. These are only a few measurements that will be presented in this post. The full description will be found in a future post. The pediatric wheelchair will still have the dinosaur appeal.

While taking measurements of one of the wheelchairs that the nurse has, they found out from the nurse that there was a wheelchair that was broken and wasn’t going to be used anymore. This information was brought up in the second team meeting we had last week. We decided that we should go and ask for the wheelchair because we could use the materials that the standard wheelchair has and just redesign it in order to fit our requirements for our pediatric wheelchair. We got the wheelchair and have started to take it apart. As we were taking it apart, we made a list of items that we need to fix in order to use the pieces of the standard wheelchair in our new design. A few changes/fixes were: the front wheels, the material that the seat is made out of, and the metal sheets on the side of the wheelchair.

In the follow days, we discussed what kind of materials we were planning to use for the small scale design. Two members went off to get reacquainted with one of the designing program that they used in ninth grade. While the two other members looked up materials like wires and plastics. We decided to fill out an order for 3-D printing plastic.

As we continue to design our wheelchair prototype, the Scarlet team was wondering if anyone has any advice on 3-D printing. Just post your answers in the comment section below.