Sunday 22 April 2018

Piece of history - mindkits moa

During the last weeks of Term One, I received a notification from mindkits that I needed to check out something. Something big was coming, http://mindkits.co.nz/moa. Being able to print off a scanned moa bone.



I have been talking to Tim for a number of years now and he was telling me some years ago that he had been able to scan a moa bone and was trying out an idea. It sounded interesting, but he wasn't allowed to share the files back then.


Little did I know that he was looking at it on this scale. He has so many boxes sitting at home with USB sticks in them with the files waiting for teachers to register so they can print there own bones.
This is incredible and allows teachers to have the deep conversations with students about the moa, extinction and history, all with a developed digital outcome.

I had been waiting for the courier package to arrive with the box and USB inside of it. However, a tweet kind of told me that this wouldn't be happening until after the holidays. Contact was made and I was on my way to pick up the box.


Little did I know that 102 hours of printing was needed for this to be developed. 5 parts of the leg would have to printed and then glued together. I knew I had limited days to do this before heading off to a conference where I wanted to be wandering around with this bone, a conversation starter, a way to energise people into the conversation.

The entire project has been printed on an Ultimaker 2+ printer using white PLA.

 


It has proven to be a popular thread on twitter as I take photos throughout the print, it is also part of the competition, to tweet @mindkits with a photo and part of the story of how you are going, I added #mindkitsmoa so I could go back and find photos of the work for this blogpost.

It has been good to go through and have opportunities over the holiday break to try new projects, this one has been something to remember.

The final print glued together.

Thank you Tim(@mindkits) and Fay(@mindkitself) for this wonderful project.

1 comment:

Myles Webb said...

Gerrad
A great, great post and series of posts about a fantastic project. Really enjoyed how you've been posting regular updates on Twitter of each of the stages and the details of the project, really appreciate it and great to see you putting the hard yards in to expose so many more educators and teachers to 3D Printing! Fantastic!
@NZWaikato