The Cuesta College 3D printing club meets in Room 3406 every Friday from 2 – 3 p.m., “although really, we stay as long as we can until they turn the machine off at four,” said Fred Krynen, a Cuesta instructor in engineering, who serves as the club advisor.
The club has recently been reformed in the beginning of the fall semester of 2025, and currently consists of around a dozen students interested in 3D printing and related fields such as engineering and materials science. “I like 3D-Printing, it drew me in,” said Ella Soderquist, a civil engineering major. The same sentiment is evident throughout the room.
The club wants to compete this year in the 3D-printed aircraft competition since “competing, even just for the sake of competing, will give us the drive to try our best,’’ according to Brett Greenawalt, a longtime member.
The club uses a SolidWorks programme to design and create its models.
The new 3D printer features a two-filament nozzle and allows members to use two material types in the same build. They also acquired a water-soluble polymer that “could work as scaffolding for more fragile designs,” said Cole Robbins, engineering major and 3D printing enthusiast. “This new printer gives us more options, but also a lot to learn,” he added.
As the deadline for the competition approaches, the club has decided to start with an open-source aircraft design. The competition has several categories, and the one the club is focused on is the gliding/ unpowered flight category. The design will then be further refined to meet their needs.
“Researching filaments is also important, as we need to look at weight-to-strength ratios,” said Greenawalt. In preparation for the many designs that will be printed in the coming weeks, the club is also looking into what filaments they should purchase, as well as what designs they want to add first.
“Perhaps we will make the wings with a rounded edge, as well as trying to make them thin to save weight,” Greenawalt said. The problems they face are not a cause for frustration; rather, they are almost looked forward to:
“Solving problems like this just itches the right part of the brain,” Greenawalt said. “This is what makes it fun.”
The club has many parallels with the 3D-printing aircraft club at Cal Poly, as both were run by Professor Eltahry Elghandour; Krynen has taken his place as the club advisor since 2025. The Cal Poly 3D-printing club won with its aircraft design in 2024, and Greenawalt and the team hope to be strong contenders this year as well.
Many Cuesta club members see the club as a great way to practice their 3D printing skills and continue their development either in the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE) groups or at Cal Poly Engineering. They are still looking for new members who “like designing and problem solving, and for those who want to learn SolidWorks,” Soderquist said. “It is a club for the self-driven, who can work in a team, and have fun trying something new.”
