DDK - Die Deutschen Klassiker

I’ve had a 3D printer for about 15months now & use it mostly for “functional” parts.

It gave me the excuse to learn CAD (Fusion 360 on a free hobby licence) and I quite enjoy the process of designing parts for a specific purpose. Still learning & I’d say I definitely lean more towards function rather than form!

Anyone else into this stuff?
Any examples you’d care to share, for inspiration?
Any tips on the topic?

Cheers

Hi Bruce.

Last Christmas I got bored, and decided to order a Crealty Ender 3 Mk2. My principle motivation was that I seemed to be spending a lot of time fabricating lots of widgety special parts for my Mondial out of metal, and I could speed the process considerably if I could do it with a 3d printer.

As I had almost zero CAD experience, I chose Tinkercad as a basic online resource, as it had online tutorials, and meant I could get up and running quickly. Pics to hopefully follow of some of the things I've made so far.

2023-03-26_06-47-40 by Jon Hewitson, on Flickr

This was a stopwatch mounting with a remote trigger to go on the handlebar of my Mondial when on the Motogiro D'Italia.

2023-03-26_06-52-15 by Jon Hewitson, on Flickr

The fuel cap for the same bike broke shortly after I started using it. I bought a repro one from Italy from the F B Mondial owners club, but it was very poorly made, and the threads were too large, and it leaked, so I made this one out of PLA, and so far its worked fine.

2023-03-26_06-46-05 by Jon Hewitson, on Flickr

Also made a roller route holder.

A 3d printer really is a fantastic tool for making up one offs of odd stuff.

Some nice designs there .
I think it’s worth having a go on fusion360. There are some weak areas such as complex curves in 3D but it’s powerful & being cloud based it doesn’t need much computing power. I learnt the basics over a couple of weeks before I got the printer.

Slicer settings are a bit of an art & one element that holds back 3D printing. I’ve also got an Ender3V2 & bed adhesion is great if I follow my routine consistently. Setting up the machine to print Nylon CF was a journey but necessary for temp resistant parts.

I think the first thing I made was a very simple flywheel oil seal tool.

Got a few projects in the works at the moment but I’ll save those until finished/ tested.

For those of us who don’t have a 3d printer, what are the cost of materials like ?

A kilo drum of basic filament is £21 from Amazon (next day). I use Esun PLA+ as the basic staple. You can buy cheaper from shopping around but you want a reasonable quality filament which is accurate/ consistent, especially the diameter as variation messes with the printing & can block the extruder. It’s also worth sticking with a brand you know, once you figure out your slicer settings as it can be tricky getting a filament dialled in.

PLA does have limitations as it can’t handle heat but it is very strong. I would like to try a drum of Hatchbox PLA-pro because it apparently has better heat resistance but it’s not easy to find in the UK for a reasonable price. You can order from Amazon US but it’s around £40 & it’s only slightly more the basic PLA at local US prices.

When you import a design into a “slicer” software (which calculates the extruder path & feed, creating the G-code for the printer), it tells you exactly how many grams of filament will be used (depending on the settings like how thick is the skin layer & the % of in-fill used).

There are plenty of other filament choices with pros/cons. The only other filament I’ve used is Nylon with carbon fibre particles added. That stuff can handle over 100C without softening so it suitable for functional car parts. However it also needs printer upgrades to get the extruder hot enough and it wears out printer nozzles fast due to the CF.

Just bought these off ebay. Someone using their 3D printer. I think the lip will bring in a little more aero

Sent from my M2004J19C using Tapatalk

Mine is mostly used for printing guns, spikes and skulls for my kids to stick to their hot wheels cars.

I still marvel at it. The ability to dream up something and turn it into a 3D object is brilliant!

I needed a simple concentric shim today. To fit a 12mm hall sensor in a 15mm bracket bore. If I had a lathe I would have been a quick job for that but I don’t. Took a couple of minutes to create the cad model and 20-ish minutes to print.

I was asked recently to make an obsolete part for a VW type 3 seat. A tiny plastic button that holds down the seat base cushion vinyl (most of it is hidden inside the seat base). A very small part which is hard to print. Had to split the model length wise & print in 2 halves & glue together.

Handy tool.

Bracket for the control cable for a throttle body.




Take a photo & import to fusion 360 as a “canvas”
Scale the photo to size using a single measurement.
A few other measurements on a drawing that a 5yr old would be embarrassed by.

Printed & add a cut down rivnut to add a metal internal thread.

Fitted with hollow adjuster & lock nut.

Fantastic stuff - very impressive

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Alternative to NLA non-heat rubber parts by Nigel

https://forum.porsche356registry.org/vi ... 15#p432115