HAVERHILL — It's like magic.
Feed a drawing into this machine, and it spits out an object that features all the moving parts shown on the design.
Students at Whittier Regional High said they've never seen anything like it. The new printer in their design drafting department is light years beyond the ordinary and puts them on the same playing field as industry professionals, they said.
"It actually prints out an object that you created as a 3D design," said Whittier senior Tristan Belanger of Haverhill.
What comes out of this printer looks and feels like the real thing, only made of plastic, and gives students a perspective on what their designs look and feel like when they hold the items. It's nothing like the old one-dimensional paper printouts of their designs that students used to get.
The new machine — known as a Dimension Uprint 3D Printer — cost $15,000 and was paid for with federal grant money, said Whittier Computer Assisted Design teacher Scott Robertson. The machine prints out objects by using software to cut the computer model into paper-thin layers, and then recreates them on top of one another in a material called vinyl ABS composite plastic.
"It allows our students to take a design concept and bring it all the way to completion," Robertson said. "It gives students a tangible result, which is hard to do when printing on paper. Before getting this, it pretty much would have stopped with a design on paper."
Small objects, such as a plastic button bearing an image of the school's logo of a wildcat paw print, take less than 30 minutes for the printer to create. Other more complicated designs, such as a working adjustable wrench or a ball bearing design, take up to five hours to create, said CAD teacher Jack Ulrich.
"Students can now check for fit, clearance and styling," Ulrich said. "This is the direction the design industry is going."
Whittier senior Brendan Moore of Haverhill, who plans to study architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology, said the printer is an asset to his shop because it gives students a competitive edge.
"We now have access to this technology that is being used in the field," Moore said. "We can take a model we design in 3D and print it out to see if it would work, what the exact shape would be, and use it as a prototype and have a physical object to look at."
In past years, students who wanted to turn their designs into 3D objects could only turn to the school's machine shop or metal fabrication shop, or else try to make it themselves out of modeling clay. Often, the result was not as detailed as this new printer is capable of producing.
"This machine has created so much interest among students," Ulrich said. "They can't wait to print their designs on it."
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