Overview
The final design was printed entirely on the Stratasys machine (Figure 1). This is because the home user printers had far too poor of a resolution to generate the mechanical and surface quality which was required. Many components required metal pins as well as epoxy glue in order to form the joints which were required for motion.
Optimization
On our third generation of the bow, we arrived at a design which yielded superior deflection and energy dissipation without cracking as previous versions had done. While we had initially hoped to optimize the underbody of the crossbow body, we did not have enough time. Future work would include topology optimization of this underbody.
Figure 1: Final Crossbow Assembly