Engineers don’t make mistakes; they make revisions. For Tyler Sprague, that meant printing gas pedals and steering wheels, refining the designs before committing to costly and irreversible metal parts.
“Prototyping is really good for validating designs and making sure you’re not wasting more money later because it’s a really cheap process to do,” said Sprague, an executive member and interior team lead for UD’s Society of Automotive Engineers Baja team. As he worked on car part designs, prototyping them — quickly making a simple model of a design for testing — cost less than $5, providing the team a cost savings of $150. Other UD design competition teams saved $300 or more for a single part.
Between the fall semester 2024 and spring 2025, the University of Dayton’s Makerspace expanded from three 3D printers to 20 state-of-the-art machines. The upgrade, made possible by an internal grant partially funded by One Day, One Dayton donors to the School of Engineering Dean’s Fund for Excellence, increased the volume and experience of student prototyping.
Amanda Duritsch, Makerspace senior lab manager, said a class design project that would overtake all three printers for two weeks now takes three printers 12 hours to make. In other words, instead of putting other users behind at a critical time when projects are due at the end of the semester, only 15% of the machines were needed 5% of the time to do the same amount of work.
Duritsch said the original printers were on their last legs, unreliable and “wasting filament like crazy.” The new equipment brings UD closer to standards students will encounter after graduation, preparing them with competitive additive-manufacturing skills.
Faculty and students wasted no time, or filament (the material used in 3D printing), in putting the upgrades to work. Duritsch said the space had more than 200 visits last spring, between courses that rely heavily on design and prototypes — first-year engineering design and senior engineering capstones — and students, faculty and staff working on passion and personal projects.
Since the updates, the Makerspace has logged more than 5,000 hours of printing. Fall 2025 included 900 print projects, using enough filament to surround the exterior of UD Arena 40 times or cover the basketball court more than 740 times.
“Because of these improvements, we get a better education in some aspects because there’s not so much wasted time wondering how long it will take to print something or if the printer is able to make it,” said Arizona Henderson, a mechanical engineering technology major and Makerspace facilitator.
Henderson is applying her Makerspace experience during her co-op at Honda’s transmission plant, where she will continue to work full time after graduation. She works regularly with the company’s 3D printers and used what she learned at UD to help set up a new printer, improve its performance and advise the team on filament options — a level of expertise that stands out for a student.
Sprague saw similar advantages during a co-op at Crown Equipment in New Bremen, Ohio, this summer. He noticed his peers didn’t have the same familiarity with 3D printing, laser cutting and other Makerspace tools, which helped him bring better questions and solutions to his workplace.
The upgrades have made the Makerspace competitive compared to public colleges and universities and, thanks to donors, Flyers will be even more competitive when seeking internships, co-ops and jobs.
“I’ve learned I’m a lot more capable than I initially thought I was,” Henderson said of her experience in the Makerspace. “I was pretty anxious going into automation classes and going into the Makerspace initially. I was afraid of touching and using the machines, but I’ve learned you just have to do it and gain the skills by doing it. You don’t learn the skills by saying, ‘Oh I haven’t done that before,’ you do it and you learn it.”