COALPORT — Glendale High School engineering design technology student Donald Dove, 18, of Coalport built a magnetic fly fishing reel from scratch using computers and a 3-D printer.
He made the fly fishing reel for his school project at the Greater Altoona Career and Technology Center.
“I love being outside and I hunt and fish, so I decided to do something that I really enjoy,” Dove said.
Dove added that he is an avid fly fisherman and ties his own flies — so he decided to make his own reel.
To make the reel, he reverse engineered a Crystal River fly fishing reel that he owned.
He took the reel apart, used a 3-D printer to model all of the reel’s 32 parts, and used a 3-D-printer to build the parts from scratch.
In all, it took about eight school days to 3-D model all of the parts and three days to print them.
The material the 3-D printer uses are filaments wound on spools. The printer heats up and melts the material and uses it to make solid plastic objects, Dove said.
It is a slow process, Dove said. The larger parts took about two and a half hours each to print, but the smaller parts took substantially less time.
Dove said the biggest challenge he had to overcome was getting all the parts constructed so they all fit together properly and operate together smoothly, because if the size of a part is off by even a small amount, the reel doesn’t operate properly.
But he got it all to work and he put it on one of his fly fishing rods. Dove tested it at Glendale Lake in Prince Gallatin State Park and at a few local streams. He even caught a few fish with it.
Despite the challenges, Dove said he was pleased with his project.
“It was definitely a lot of fun,” Dove said. “And I learned a lot of new things.”
Dove said he learned that, at least on a small scale, what manufacturers go through to design and produce a product and how to overcome problems during the process.
After graduating from high school, Dove said he would like to pursue a career in computer aided design.
Credit: Source link
