Our Fulton FAB LAB Visit!

On Monday, February 24^th, Patrick, Christa, and I had the pleasure to meet Assistant Superintendent Dr. Suzanne Hull and Science and Engineering teacher Mr. Jim Hall of the Fulton Public School district.  The purpose?  Just last week, they unveiled Missouri’s first K-12 school Fabrication Lab (http://www.fulton58.org/vnews/display.v/ART/53078ffa3da7f).   Congratulations to Fulton on their historic achievement!

We toured the classroom where the MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printers, MakerBot 3D scanner, and Roland vinyl cutter are located.  The printer was in the middle of creating a white golf ball.  Jim shared his experiences with the equipment and gave us some good tips on expectations, handling, and operations.  For example, when asked about length of time to print, a standard golf ball at 100% fill takes almost 3 hours to print!   Tinkercad (http://tinkercad.com/) is the 3D CAD software of choice, and as a side note, Tinkercad also works with Google Chromebooks.

In the shop area resides many other pieces of fabulous equipment, but of specific interest is the Epilog Laser Cutter.  This unit requires a dedicated 110V circuit, external ventilation, and air assist.  They use a dedicated PC with CorelDraw installed.  When running, the ventilation system generated sound one would expect to hear in a shop environment.  One piece of equipment we hadn’t considered before is a Heat Press for heat transfer projects, i.e. transferring content generated from the vinyl cutter to t-shirts! 

We thanked Suzanne and Jim for their time in showing us around the lab, the demonstration, and for some of the samples we were given to take back.  Last, Jim offered his and his student’s services to help us with the establishment of our makerspace and training.