How long will a 3D printed cylinder head last? Let's find out!

over the past 20 to 30 years plastique has come a long ways now we can actually use 3d printers to print various types of products but is the plastic that's used in a 3d printer tough enough to withstand the combustion pressures and temperatures of a small engine today we're going to find out thanks to Terry from southern Manitoba Canada who sent us a couple of silver heads and a couple of gaskets so we're going to be testing both of those to see how they hold up that that thing is beautiful I'm still gonna have to tap the spark plug hole but that should not be a problem look at these gaskets this is gonna be a lot of fun to test these out to see how they hold up beautiful look at this solder head so the purple cylinder head is made of ABS plastic and it weighs twelve point seven ounces this cylinder head is made of PLA and it's very clearly heavier very heavy son or head Wow almost a pound fifteen point eight ounces now in the past we've made other types of seller heads this is a jb weld cylinder head it's smaller dimensions but it weighs 11.5 ounces it's very dense this held up very nicely this is the reigning champ of the wooden cylinder heads this is some walnut it lasted over two minutes and you can see it's only five point one ounce it's very light I need to tap the soda head so I'm going to use the drill press to get the tap straight they don't remove it from the drill press and finish tapping it wow this plastic is very easy to tap and it looks great I'm a bit put sparkplug in the cylinder head this spark plug worked really nicely with this cylinder head you can see the tip is sticking out this is going to provide a really good source of ignition and it's not going to be recessed inside the head like some of the wood and cellar heads where when we tested them I'm going to use the Briggs & Stratton gasket for the plaque stick silver head testing and then we're going to use the plastic gaskets on a metal cylinder head [Music] [Music] since this is a plastic cylinder head I'm gonna go ahead and set up a ground for the spark plug [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the reason the engine stopped running is because the plastic melted all over the electrode on a spark plug causing it not to function so I'm gonna clean the spark plug off and get this thing going again [Music] [Music] unfortunately the spark plug ended up having a lot of plastic get into it again causing the engine to stall we're gonna pull the silver hat off now and see how it looks wow that's a lot of damage this piece of plastic looks like it came right off of the valve look at how much damage though is done around the spark plug this here is hard plastic it's melted plastic the piston was hitting the plastic as it was melting causing that knocking sound so this plastic changes color was purple and now it looks like it's more of a pink almost a light red I'm gonna put a piece of ice on it and see if it changes back to purple check that out it's purple and that's going to gradually go back to pink there's a lot of plastic buildup on the intake valve as well as the exhaust valve swim do now is use a wire brush to clean all this off so we can begin the next task we're using the other cylinder head [Music] [Applause] I'm gonna start for the new spark plug and I'm gonna go ahead and create a large gap just to avoid plastic causing it to fail on us [Applause] so the electrode on the spark plug was just fine unfortunately it looks like the plastic melted around the spark plug and a spark plug blew out look go ahead take the cylinder head off and we'll see how it looks on the inside now that's a lot of damage a plastic melted and found its way to the bottom of this cylinder head and then the course then was banging up against the piston ultimately the engine stopped running though because the spark plug blew out there's a lot of plastic on this piston and on the intake and exhaust valves I'm gonna try to spin this engine over and see if these valves are sort of stuck I heard it pop it's very stiff Wow look at that piece of plastic that's on this valve whose likeness plastic is coming off fairly easy it had an oily coating on it from before so it's coming right off now I'm going to test out the 3d cylinder head gasket with an aluminum cylinder head [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] as I expected the failure occurred right next to the exhaust valve right where most of the heat is taking place well I'm really impressed with how the 3d printed products performed especially that ABS plastic lasting and combined a minute and 23 seconds while the PLA only lasted 17 seconds I was really impressed with the initial compression reading we got obviously it's holding a nice tight seal but it just can't handle the heat so very strong material just very sensitive to heat the gasket lasted over a minute as well very impressive performance I can see we're having a 3d printer in the shop would be very handy for making most gaskets that aren't exposed to a lot of heat because it would work really well what other video ideas do you guys have I always like to read your comments and I get my future video ideas from you thanks so much for watching the video and I look forward to seeing next time [Music]

Channel: Project Farm

Views: 2,050,938

Rating: 4.8512187 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, family friendly, project farm, sea foam motor treatment, Seafoam, additive, oil, crankcase, lock up, sea foam, lucas, marvel mystery oil, marvels, marvel, mystery oil, engine, believe, seefoam, Sea foam, Seefoam, See Foam, seafome, noisy lifter, does seafoam work, smoke, knock, lifter, sea, test, jb weld, jb, weld, cracked cylinder, wood, seafoam, mmo, IPE, walnut, cylinder head, 3d cylinder head, 3d head, abs, pla, abs plastic, pla plastic

Id: HNRO48PlbHg

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Squid_Chunks]

That lasted a lot longer than I'd have expected, and didn't fail as catastrophically as I expected (hoped)!

I do feel the guy starting and stopping the timer probably shouldn't be facing directly towards the 3d printed engine part.

[u/ThePfeiffenator]

He needs to do a nylon one now.

[u/opm881]

Wonder how using the PLA for casting a head would go.

[u/warbunnies]

Polymaker makes a nylon now that can withstand 180c. he should try that.

[u/tzedek]

Would be neat to add water cooling to the head and try to make it run longer.