First 3D Printed Prototypes at Fabrica del Sol

We have the first 3d printed prototypes ready! Thanks to the city of Barcelona’s Fablab network we worked with the Ateneu de Fabricacio. The Ateneu is a open public creative maker space that promotes sustainable projects, ideas and solutions that can make an impact in the city. It is a municipal network of spaces open to the public like a city library. Since we were one of the first people to come with an idea for making a protype we were welcome by the staff and supported during many days. Special thanks to Laura Sardi, Adria Colominas and Alfons Miás for their support in designing, 3d printing and providing the space to develop and present the project. We were able to experiment with the regular hard filament and also to make a concept of a soft cap that would not need to be screwed on a bottle top but just inserted with a little bit of pressure. This would be convenient since not 100% of PET bottles have the same thread. About 20% of the bottles have a wider thread than that of soda bottles, specially water bottles in Europe. This solution was proposed by Adria who collaborated in the inital design. This experiment served specially to get to know 3d printing, the benefits (rapid prototyping), limitations (low speed for series production, quality inconsistency) and future potential (new materials, new techniques). It also served to make the concept more concrete as it was the first time since the idea started a few months before that we had a customized object with a creative design, helping us envision what the final Faircap could look like in the future and what variables would be important to consider, such as measurements, shapes, features, etc.