Can 3d Printing Improve Your Car?

hey i'm bob and i like to make stuff today we're going to make this car better with a 3d printer [Music] if you've been around the channel for a while you've probably seen this thing this is my 1992 land cruiser i love this thing and it just turned 30 years old one of the terrible things about having a 30 year old vehicle is that stuff constantly breaks things just wear out fortunately the mechanical stuff is pretty easy to replace and to find new parts for the harder thing to find is the stuff that goes on the inside of the car the little bits and bobs plastic things knobs covers things like that it's just really hard to find them when you look around inside your car there is a ton of plastic there's also some fabric and some big things that you probably can't replace but there's tons of little knobs switches covers all sorts of things that will eventually probably wear out or just completely disappear i've had several things like this in my car and so there's a couple things that have been causing a problem and i need to replace them but before i show you those take a second and look around your car think about all the different things in here that could be replaced some of them maybe just to make them work better some of them just to make them look better you could actually customize a lot of the interior of your car just by changing the color of knobs and buttons and things like that it's actually a pretty good way to learn 3d modeling all right let me show you what the big problem is here in this car i shouldn't say the big problem it is one of the problems i'm trying to fix right now it's also very cold out here so if i'm chattering a little bit sorry but the problem is that this handle right here is supposed to have a latch on it and this is so that you can pull this up and the seat will fold down and all that stuff but that latch fell off so a lot of times i'll go to grab the seat belt and it will get caught underneath this piece or hooked on the end of it like that and it just ends up being a problem it's also not very safe because the seat belt doesn't go all the way over my lap like it should so i want to remake this piece to avoid that entire problem but of course there's actually two of these there's one on each side and so i can model one and mirror it for the other side let's go to the computer where it's not so cold and i'll show you the plane so this is the piece that we actually need to recreate this is the one i took off the passenger side and it's facing the wrong direction but we can 3d model this then mirror it and we'll have one for the driver's side as well so we can replace them both or just replace the one that we're missing either way this is where we need to start now anytime you're going to 3d model something for the real world you have to be able to fully describe that thing so you have to write down the outer dimensions of the entire thing but then also like the thickness of it how that thickness changes from the top to the bottom the size of the holes where the holes are in relation to the outside edges those are all things you set down with a pair of calipers measure and write down and then you can take them into 3d modeling now the flip side to that is that you don't actually have to recreate this all you have to really copy is the mounting points how is it going to interact with the thing that is fixed inside the car if that's what you're worried about then just keep track of those things but in our case we're going to try to recreate this entire piece the way that i usually start is by taking the thing itself and then tracing the outside edges of it this gives me a clear point to draw the dimensions on so that i don't get confused later on it might make more sense for you to just sketch the thing in 3d and write the dimensions around it but in this case i can take each one of the profiles and then measure all the things that i care about with the calipers and then write those numbers right and around the drawing and then i can just switch to a different profile measure the stuff write it and just keep moving along and then i've got a nice data sheet of all the different measurements that i care about so at this point you should have all your measurements but you probably actually don't in fact you won't really know all the different things that you need to measure about this until you start modeling you're going to find lots of little tapers and different thicknesses of things that you didn't even think about writing down so just make sure to go back and get the measurements as you need them then you got to start modeling it now for modeling i'm gonna be using fusion 360 because that's what i'm used to in fact we have an online course called fusion 360 for makers that will take all of this way deeper and help you totally use the program for stuff like this and a bunch of other types of projects but whether you use fusion or something else you're still going to have to get all those measurements and translate them into a 3d model one of the cool things about fusion though is that you can take all those measurements and put them in parameters and basically in fusion that's a list of names and values so you could say total width and then put in the measurement for the total width you can put total height and then put in the total height measurement once you get the model made if you need to change a measurement about something all you got to do is change the parameter and the model will react if it's modeled correctly but regardless of whether you're using fusion and go that route or you're using a totally different piece of software like sketchup or blender or something else you're gonna have some trial and error get the first draft of the piece that you need stand back and look at it and see if it actually does the thing you need to do and if not feel free to just start over you're just spending your time and you're learning with every iteration that you do of any of these pieces so i'm going to jump in and get this piece modeled up and then we'll do some test prints this video is sponsored by micro center and if you're not familiar micro center is the awesome electronics store for makers like us not only do they have normal consumer electronics but they also have all the components you would need to build a custom pc in fact they have people in store that can help you build it but they've also got an entire row of raspberry pi's arduinos sensors that go with those things and 3d printers so if you're watching this video and you don't know exactly which 3d printer you want you can walk into a micro center and have one of their helpful knowledgeable staff come walk you through the different machines and help you pick out the right one for you on top of that they've got drones they've got camera gear they've got all sorts of stuff that you may need for your maker journey be sure to go check out a micro center near you and if you've never been into the store they want you to come in and check it out so they've given us a link that we're going to put down in the description it's to a form that you can fill out with some basic information and when you take that form into the store you can get 128 gig usb drive and 128 gig micro sd card just for showing up it's pretty awesome on top of all of that micro center has a great online community where you can share your projects get feedback from other makers and just learn about all the different tech that you're interested in so be sure to go check out micro center be sure to hit that link down below and big thanks to them for sponsoring this video so i've been working on some test prints and i've made a few iterations of this piece and it's getting really really close i wanted to point out though that as you're printing test iterations of a piece it doesn't really matter what material you use or the quality that you're using as long as you can get the fit the prototypes are all about making sure that it does the thing it needs to do and that it fits correctly and then once you've got all those things out of the way with inexpensive materials and quick ugly prints then when it's all done you take your time and do a really nice high quality print with the right material so material is a big deal here let's talk about that for a really long time my default plastic that i used in pretty much all 3d printers was pla it's cheap it's easy to print it works on just about any type of print bed but it definitely has a drawback when it comes to working with stuff for cars the inside of a car can get easily over 100 degrees on a hot day and pla has a much lower melting temperature than some of the other plastics that people use in 3d printers and that means that if you print some of these parts put them in a hot car they're gonna start to sag and droop and maybe even fall apart at the layer lines in fact i've had this happen to me several years ago i made a little control box that go in my land cruiser that will play sounds on the outside of the car when you press a button [Applause] well i 3d printed the enclosure in pla and although it definitely still functions and still works in the car you can see that it is sagged over the years being in a hot car has just kind of let it droop a little bit and it's changed shape and you definitely don't want that so instead of using pla i would suggest using petg at this point it's really easy to print there's great profiles for it and so it's what i use for everything in fact one of the reasons i use it is because it's so easy to sand it's not very often that i take something off the printer and immediately put it into use most everything that i print ends up getting primed and painted and sanded a little bit and so petg is really good for that but in this case we're not going to finish it it's going to come right off the printer and go in the car i've been doing some test prints i've got a few different prototypes and i've had to make really small adjustments to how they mount onto that metal bar inside the car but i think i'm at a point where i can do a final print for the one that i modeled and then mirror that piece to make the other side so here's the thing that we modeled from this is the original piece right off the car and then this is what we ended up with and it's not exactly the same some of the profiles are a little bit different but it's absolutely functional and it fits really really well so now i've got those pieces printed in petg i know that they're good to go i could put them in the car and move on but i want to try one more thing with them i've never really experimented with using an sla print or resin print inside of a hot vehicle i don't see any reason why it wouldn't work but i haven't tested it so i'm going to print those same pieces on an sla printer and then maybe put one of each type in the car for a week and see how they perform so let's go get those things screwed into place make sure they work and then we can talk about the next thing to fix in the car that thing worked perfectly now the only thing i might change here is actually go back and reprint this at 100 infill so it's really a solid piece of plastic right now it does have a little bit of squish in it that i think might end up causing a problem if you pull on it a lot if it's printed at 100 it will be a solid piece and it will be just fine and even past that if you really wanted to you could make a mold of this piece cast it in something like urethane or whatever okay so this thing is done let's talk about one of the other things in here that really really bothers me one of the things that's really annoying about most old cars is the cup holder or the lack of cup holder in this case i've got a couple of small cup holders but they're really small they're made for cups of the 1990s and these days we have much larger containers that we carry drinks around in so those don't really do much for me but i do have this big section in the middle that i can kind of turn into a cup holder now the problem with this little cubby is that it's a super weird shape this shape has a taper on each side and the tapers are not consistent so i've tried to measure the bottom surface and the top surface and try to model something that goes in between them and it's just taken several iterations i've done a bunch of test prints just to get the bottom piece right so it fits all the way down in there and now i think i'm finally at a point where i've got something printed that should be able to drop in and hold a cup okay real quick i thought i was done with this i printed out what i thought was going to be the last print and i put it in place and it works fine but it only really works for one cup so i've kind of changed my mind and i came up with a different idea i took this model and then cut it up into some more pieces so that it can be flexible to hold different sized cups here's where i ended up let me just explain this and know that this is a first draft this is going to take some additional work to get it to actually do what i want it to do but basically i took the shape that i had and cut out the middle section and then i took part of that curve that matches the cup and cut it out as a separate piece so that it can drop in there and slide back and forth that way i can put some spring tension on the inside of this pushing it together and the cup goes in it can push it out and those springs can hold the cup in place so on the back of each one of these pieces i made some little keyholes those keyholes are to match the size of some springs that i had just from the local hardware store and they kind of sit in there so there's a matching keyhole on the inside of this piece as well which you might be able to see right in there so the idea is that these springs sit in those keyholes like that then the sliding piece will fit in there on top and match into those keyholes with the springs and then we have a little cap that can just snap on and cover it all up so now this is what it looks like this piece right here is spring loaded so that when you push on it it slides back under that cover this thing totally works but there's always room for improvement so i'm going to call this a first draft and i'll continue to work on this one of the big things that it needs is to have this top back edge be able to move with the spring-loaded piece because right now this opening limits how big of a cup you can put in there if this edge moves with it then you have a lot more flexibility of course that's going to change the geometry of the sides how it fits into the pocket all sorts of stuff i'll deal with that later but i hope this gave you an idea speaking of ideas i asked josh and anthony to come up with some ideas for their cars that they could 3d print and here's what they came up with [Music] these are just a couple of ideas that i needed in my car and the guys needed in their cars but i'm sure you have different problems that you can solve and if you do leave those ideas down in the comments because they may help us or somebody else also if you've got any other general 3d printing tips leave those down there because that's helpful for everybody we've got tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time one of the great things and awful things about 30 not great i'll go to grab the seat belt and it'll get caught i can't do it now there are tons and tons tons tons tons also if you've got any other just general 3d printing tips those are always helpful and it's cold i'm really cold okay

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 398,358

Keywords: i like to make stuff, iliketomakestuff, diy, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, 3D printing, prop making, custom cars, custom car parts, aftermarket car parts, 3d print, 3d printer, prusa, creality, ender 3, resin printer, custom car horn, 3d printed car parts, 3d printed car accessories, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printer projects, 3d printing nerd, modifying cars, diy car accessories, car accessories for cheap, 3d modeling, fusion 360, autocad, microcenter

Id: SndYymulUe4

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022