I Tested a 3D Printed Shock Absorber

shock absorbers are super important they play a huge role in keeping your car or bike on the road and without them driving doesn't look so fun no more you see there's Twin Tube monotube and there's pneumatic but you know what I haven't heard of 3D printed shocks that's what today I decided that I was going to build a 3D printed shock absorber do a couple tests with it and then we're gonna see just how good it is the first thing I did is I started by printing the piston and when I got pretty sick of waiting for that to finish I then went ahead and cut the tube to length I then printed the rest of the parts out of petg which is really great against oil and it looks pretty good too now the thing with shock absorbers is they only really work on those fluid in them not out of them so in order to keep the fluid from leaking out when the shaft is moving in and out I remade one of the seals from the fluid coupler video which worked really well at keeping the oil inside I had all the parts finished so I used JV well to put them all together which went extremely well so now this is the fun part where I put it all together this is done this is really dumb oh boy this smells so good does it come out I didn't actually think about how I was gonna put this together couple the bottom part on first that makes more sense I'm gonna get the money show you to show the camera what I'm up to I'm just gonna like okay that's probably good I also apparently made sure that the video was out of focus the entire time it's like drawing faster that can put it on it's not good that's the cylinder done okay so I finished putting all the parts together all I have to do is wait for the JB Weld to finish drying and then tomorrow I'm gonna fill it up with oil and do some experimenting with it okay it's now the second day of night actually and I'm fairly certain the JB Weld is done welding so we can perform the coup de gras now there is a bit of a trick to this and the trick is not to spill any because if you do it literally cannot get off anything not just messing with you but the thing I'm going to do first is fill it up then put the piston in it push it down a bit and then fill it up the rest of the way and this will hopefully stop any kind of aeration from happening uh that can affect the shock absorber performance so let's do it when filling it up with vegetable oil I filled it up first put the piston in there it is and then I filled it up the rest of the way this is also when I realized that I had overfilled it oh [ __ ] and this is what it looks like when it's fully complete you can't see the oil in it but you can see what happens when it's full of oil it actually takes very little effort to just push it down if I hit it with a more impulsive Force it actually stops it with more resistance okay so it looks to me like the shock absorber is absorbing shock but to find out how much shock it's going to absorb let's hit it with a mallet okay so I think we're all familiar with what happens when you hit something with a hammer no surprise but what should happen is when I hit the shock absorber it should absorb the shock and slow it down wow okay [Music] it's actually doing a pretty good job the best way I could describe it is almost like hitting a really hard sponge but there's just no recoil on it sick now you might be sitting there going how do these freaking things work to combat this I made a transparent one that lets you to see what's going on inside that don't look very transparent to me an easy way to picture a shock absorber is pretty much just brakes but for your suspension this braking effect is called dampening but what causes it inside the shock is oil and oil is non-compressible which means that if we have small holes in the piston and try to push it around the oil is forced through these small passages and has to make its way to the other side this is very difficult and generates a lot of resistance in that resistance is generated heat and that's how you turn kinetic energy into heat energy it's so cool now the difference between a shock absorber and a spring is that a shock absorber will take a blow and slow it down to a complete stop this is because Springs will store that energy as potential energy meanwhile shock absorbers will convert that kinetic energy and turn it into thermal energy now this is actually the reason why cars are equipped with both shocks and springs if your car's only had Springs it would drive something like this anyways basically the size of these holes determines how much dampening make them really narrow that generates a lot of resistance and a lot of heat but make them really large and there is less resistance and less heat anyways back to the testing we saw that it worked pretty well it did exactly what a shock absorber is supposed to do but earlier we just discussed that the kinetic energy should be turned into thermal energy that's how it's able to slow it down which means that after every blow it should be getting warmer so then I've got a thermometer here let's hit it a bunch and see just how warm we can get it I made it my gold the hammer on this until it started to get really warm it didn't take me long to figure out that this is going to take a lot longer than I thought it would around the five minute Mark I switched over to this heavier hammer and began hitting it much harder to speed things up it's making too much noise so I'm gonna have to start hitting it on the floor I carried on with the intention to see it through to the end and noticed that it was getting a lot warmer hey you guys but around the 15 minute Mark however all was well until it hit it a little too hard so I uh I wasn't recording but I was worried this might happen yeah you can see that big crack on the bottom sick dude unfortunately too much time had passed before I could measure the temperature accurately but the cylinder was still a little bit warmer than it was before if I had the right size copper cap lying around I would have used one of those and just soldered it on instead but I was still impressed that the cap even broke apart before the JB Weld had leaked okay so it looks like you can actually 3D print a working shock absorber and this will prove useful in the future so don't forget that one thing for sure is that I probably shouldn't be using oil from a wok dish I will probably use actual oil maybe engine oil anyways guys thank you for watching this video make sure you subscribe so that your fingernails don't get too long and until then peace guys

Channel: Camden Bowen

Views: 74,601

Keywords: Camden Bowen, Engine, 3d printing, Longer, 3d printer review, shock absorber, how do shocks work, bad shocks, new shocks, shock absorbing, diy, homemade, bad shock absorber

Id: XsK_vLPWfOA

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023