Falkirk Model flying club & 3D printing

 

 falkirks model Flying Club meets at the hub once a month during the winter we think they are an amazing bunch, The big planes that they bring in are incredible creations our sustainability champion can't resist going in for a look around, He is always made welcome by the group lead and the people who have come along to talk about their planes, he likes to ignore that fact he personally pledges to go flight free for the environment, the airplane industry is carbon intense because he is in awe of the skilled work These hobbyists do in recreating amazing flying machines,

One of the most unusual donations the hub ever got was a big model plane for the model flying club. The person who nearly binned it, came to the hub to see if he could leave it for the Model Flying Club that meets here once a month. The plane was quite large and needed some TLC, so we stored it until the club's meeting. They decided to auction it among the members present that evening to see who would take it home to their hangar. The plane had what is referred to in the club as “hangar rash.” The auction closed at £4, which was donated directly to the hub. We haven't decided how to spend this small fortune yet.but Monty, our mascot and zero waste champion, loved how we have helped save the toy plane from land fill, monty doesnt agree with toys being binned

 this month seen something new to our sustainability champion, The model Flying Club had two planes that had been created using a 3D printer this is also called additive manufacturing,which is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a Computer Aided Design model or a digital, It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control, with the material being added together (e.g. plastics, liquids, or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer.

In the 1980s, 3D printing techniques were considered suitable only for the production of functional or aesthetic prototypes, a more appropriate term for it at the time was rapid prototyping,  As of 2019, the precision, repeatability, and material range of 3D printing have increased to the point that some 3D printing processes are considered viable as an industrial-production technology!

 The Hubs historian has recently written about the beginnings of the industrial revolution being here in Scotland in 1760 fueled by coal and steel  in this context, the term used synonymously with 3D printing. Means that the industrial revolution that began here with coal and iron , is now being powered globally by artificial intelligence, as AI is considered globally as the fourth industrial revolution. 

One of the key advantages of 3D printing is the ability to produce very complex shapes or geometries that would be otherwise infeasible to construct by hand, including hollow parts or parts with internal truss structures to reduce weight while creating less material waste. Fused deposition modelling (FDM), which uses a continuous filament of a thermoplastic material, is the most common 3D printing process in use as of 2020,  

Our sustainability champion is trying to instill degrowth ethics and initiatives focused on a return to nature into the mindset of hub users. He believes that sustainability goals should move away from further manufacturing and industrialised scale production of unnecessary and often wasteful single-use items or products that go unused. The toy industry, in particular, is extremely wasteful. However, the manufacturers of toy planes could be seen as pioneers in this context. 

While one airplane was powered by a diesel engine, the other operated on an electric battery. Model flyers are particularly fascinated by the calculations of weight to flight time. This method of manufacture does produce extremely lightweight planes.