I have been watching the G+ feed of Michael Curry (Skimbal) during his self-imposed maker-residency at Hammerspace in Kansas City, and by golly he appears to be making a 3D printed vehicle, system by system.
As in for actual humans, not LEGO minifigs. (Though I wouldn’t put it past him to keep scaling up his minifig project!)
Check out work towards the rear suspension (above) and the differential from the transmission below!
Dec 31, 2013: Update on my 3d printed vehicle project. Finished building the Rear Suspension test rig today. Next up is load testing, then on to designing some CV joints and driveshafts. Printed in PLA on two Makerbot Replicators. The parts are all printed at the default medium settings (2 shells, 10% density, .2mm layer height) except for the blue pins, which are printed at 20% density with 4 shells.
Dec 14, 2013: Bench Test of my 3d Printed rear differential. Printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 at Medium settings: 2 shells, 0.2mm layer height, and 10% infill density. The buckets have a combined weight of 70 pounds (30 kilos). At the end the chain slips off sprocket and got twisted, with ended testing for the day.
Read more about rear differential here or rear suspension here.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!