#3DPrinted Firebird Head Light Motor Gear Repair #3DThursday #3DPrinting
Brandon Kirkland shared a 3D Printed Head Light Motor Gear guide: “This is my Instructable where I document designing, and 3D printing my own 2000 Firebird Headlight gear”
…I’ve had a 2000 Firebird since I was 16 and I’ve been driving it daily. I’m very nostalgic for the car, and though it’s showing a lot of wear I try my best to keep it in shape. But after almost 15 years the teeth of the headlight motor gear sheared off and the passenger light made a ‘jackhammer’ sound whenever the motor was engaged. It’s a common problem, and there are a lot of solutions out there including buying a new gear or just replacing the headlight motor altogether.
The original gear in question was made by GM/Pontiac out of nylon. Very recently I finished designing and building my own custom 3D printer and I knew it could print Nylon filament. So this was the perfect opportunity!
In my personal experience, I believe having 3D printing technology at home can save a lot of money particularly if you’re already skilled with CAD. And yes printing a new gear was accomplished for ~25% of the cost for a new gear. But I’m really doing this because it a more ‘personal’ solution than just buying something off-the-shelf and let’s me put my touch on the car….
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! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. 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!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
