Our project is to create a knife for a boy missing the fingers on his left hand.
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Background information: Diego is a kid who has a malformation at the hand and doesn't have his whole fingers. He only has the beginning of them on one hand. It makes daily actions quite impossible or with important difficulties, and one of them is eating, more specifically holding a knife.
Our goal: Giving him the possibility to hold a knife, so he's able to eat alone.
Tools used: Fusion 360 (to design the prototypes) and a 3D printer.
Here is the final prototype that we made for Diego's knife.
We've rounded the edges, the blade hole is now oriented vertically so that the blade is in the right direction, and we've made the handle smaller.
We'll secure the blade with bathroom sealant, to make sure cutting is possible. That's the best solution we found to ensure Diego's security.
We then move to the next part of our project and make it real. Hence, we thought with a system in which we can put the blade of a knife in which we would have made holes before. On the side of the handle, you can find holes to put screws to fix the knife in the handle. However after printing, we realized that there was a size problem and a wrong orientation to put the hole. We therefore abandoned the idea of putting screws because by changing the angle of the blade, it would be too complicated for us to put screws. Also, we think that for safety reasons it is good that we removed them because Diego has little brothers and sisters and they could have choked with them.
For this project, there were different ideas (similar but still different) so here's one of them.
Compared to the other idea, this time the blade would be below his hand and the hole for his fingers is slightly bigger.
The tiny rectangular hole that we see at the right is to let the blade passes through.
Even though we have enlarged the handle, you can see that Diego's hand is too big for it (modelled in a yellow silicone).
So, we just enlarged my body by one and a half times on fusion 360.
The impression was to small. I only passed the beginning of three fingers of my hands.
Here, you can see some of our drawings and sketches that we've done in order to find the best design for the handle. Our main goal was to make it as praticable possible for him. We have choose the kind of knife just under the "Exemple à suivre". With this model, he can have enough space to put all his fingers as well as a spot for his thumb and the blade of real knife screwed in it.
charlineleclert
Greg Stephens
ben.brochtrup
Alessia Ianni-Palarchio