A big thanks to the UVa Mechanical Aeospace Engineering team for taking me under their wing to prepare for a future 3D printing class for SEP! I learned a bunch from my planning meeting at their department, including:

**You can make a 3D model of stuff like this (Galileo's Pendulum, btw):

The MechEng team is in the process of putting their 10 inch replica together; 10 parts total took approximately 14 hrs to print!

**While .obj files are the 3D printing standard file format (and what Sculptris gives you the option to create for export), the UVa 3D printers are most compatible using .stl files, and the MechEng team uses this 123Dapp freeware suit to build projects exported to .stl (of the 8 downloads, Tinkercad is recommended by their team).

**If your car's wipers break and won't pass inspection, and you're faced with a $300 bill to fix, guess what? You can print the small part needed on a 3D printer!

I plan to open a Tinkercad account in the next week (it operates in your browser so no download is necessary) to introduce as a side application to teach along with Sculptris for my UVa Saturday Enrichment Program, 3D class so I'll post some feedback about it shorty...