Post by FMW on Nov 20, 2016 10:53:41 GMT -8
Looking at the plastic strand thickness produced by my 3D printer, I got the silly idea that it might be possible to print 1/25 scale wire wheels. The pictures below show my "limited success". (Limited Success means that it didn't catch fire and burn down the house.)
These are the wheel parts from my first-cut design, with ~scale rim thickness. The inner edge of the rims didn't print successfully.
My second-stage printing increased the rim thickness to just fit inside a typical 60's model car tire. The rims printed better, but there was some misprinting of the wire levels, indicating that there would be a yield problem on subsequent printing.
Here are pictures of the assembled wheels. The skinny one is the first-cut version. Since I printed the wheels with my PLA plastic, they had to be glued together with gooey non-solvent watch crystal cement. (I use it for windshields & headlight lenses.) PLA does not have a readily available, life-form friendly solvent cement, but my PLA is currently my only black filament, which would have lent itself to "chroming" with magic powder or Alclad II. I apologize for the quality of the pictures, but my camera sometimes has trouble with macro-focus.
Each wheel required 14 separate gluing operations, with clamping. If I change to ABS filament, change some printing parameters to maybe produce better output, and build some assembly tooling, I might be able to create better parts with only 6 or 7 gluing steps. For the time being, I'm labeling printed wire wheels as "possible but not practical".
FMW
These are the wheel parts from my first-cut design, with ~scale rim thickness. The inner edge of the rims didn't print successfully.
My second-stage printing increased the rim thickness to just fit inside a typical 60's model car tire. The rims printed better, but there was some misprinting of the wire levels, indicating that there would be a yield problem on subsequent printing.
Here are pictures of the assembled wheels. The skinny one is the first-cut version. Since I printed the wheels with my PLA plastic, they had to be glued together with gooey non-solvent watch crystal cement. (I use it for windshields & headlight lenses.) PLA does not have a readily available, life-form friendly solvent cement, but my PLA is currently my only black filament, which would have lent itself to "chroming" with magic powder or Alclad II. I apologize for the quality of the pictures, but my camera sometimes has trouble with macro-focus.
Each wheel required 14 separate gluing operations, with clamping. If I change to ABS filament, change some printing parameters to maybe produce better output, and build some assembly tooling, I might be able to create better parts with only 6 or 7 gluing steps. For the time being, I'm labeling printed wire wheels as "possible but not practical".
FMW