Solving problems with 3D printing: Upgrade your car!

okay so if you're following me on Twitter some of you might have seen the BMW i8 behind crusher while I visited their factory a few weeks ago but just to be clear that's not my car this is actually what I drive so this is a 2007 Opel Astra station wagon it's the best car I could drive like it's the perfect car for me it's cheap it's big it's economical like it does everything I needed to yeah it's got a few rough spots but it's got one more pretty fatal flaw that were actually gonna fix today so stick around for that but first thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video stay around till the end for a special day for you guys and for more info on what they do alright let's head in here so even though this car was built in 2007 it's got like most comforts up it's got heated seats it's got like cruise control it's got a Bluetooth radio which was put in after the fact but the one thing it doesn't have is any sort of navigation any sort of smart system I mean this is where that would usually be so what I typically do is I take my phone plop it in here that kind of looks like it's supposed to be there I even like put a rubber strip in here that keeps it from falling out but the problem is it still falls around like this isn't secured in you know at all for example if you have to take off from a red light okay it stays in there but sharp turns also stays in there okay let's see the thing is this works as is but if we have to charge it like if we actually have to put a use P cord in here like so come on like now it doesn't go in there it's either like hanging out this way or it's all the way crooked and now if we actually XO it let's try this again yeah it just falls out by it so same thing like any any amount of turning it's already coming out so this isn't working obviously so you can use it without the power cord for an hour or so until the battery runs out but in fact you want to plug it in it's game over so what we're gonna do today is we're actually gonna design print and install a mount that just has the phone flipped in like this like nice and secure right there just cluck-cluck really solid enough spacing that we can I plug in a power cord and also not designed it for the 1 plus 3t but actually designed it for the g6 which is now fantastically starting Android auto that is good so yeah this is my full time phone now and we're gonna measure this out we're gonna make a mount that fits this perfectly and I kind of want to use this GoPro style mounting plate so this actually allows me to remove whatever's in here so that we don't have like this mounts taking up the time temperature and date displaying here which is I don't know it's pointless anyways if you have a phone in there but it just looks cleaner if you just have this standard plate stuck in here and then the clip with the removable phone mount just clip in in and out like this but I think that is a much cleaner look and something that's stuck in there so let's get to designing this thing alright so this is the GoPro mount that I want to work off of it sees two parts that just snap together and I think it's pretty much the standard GoPro mount these days so the features we're gonna have to design are these two slots on the side that's where the main part of that buckle slides in it also has the center guide that slots into this notch right up here and it also has these two flaps that make it the buckle part that actually hold the top part in place now if you look at the guide section on the side it's not a continuous part right there it's actually cut out in the center so that these arms are allowed to flex because the front of these arms is actually a functional part of the rail that holds this entire thing in place so let's grab a few measurements here I'm just using super cheap calipers these are fine because we're gonna be fudging the dimensions anyways we're gonna make a few test parts and see how well everything fits so it seems like the total width is 28 millimeters the total length of this slot is 25 the width of the center guide is three and a half millimeters so I think we're just gonna use a four millimeter wide slot for that to slide into and then as we actually measure the height of the main guide on the side right here we're running into a bit of an issue because the rear part of the calipers don't really fit in all that well so you have two options right here you can either use the depth gauge on the bottom side of the calipers and eyeball how deep everything is or you can use the rear side of the caliper head right there that's also a measuring part and again eyeball it line it up roughly and we're seeing that this is five millimeters deep and I think that's all the dimensions we need we're gonna use this exact mount and just this end buckle part custom to fit this one and just make a few test parts and see how well everything fits together and then adjust the printed part and make it fit so for the printed clip I'm basically just copying all the dimensions from the physical clip that I already have and that I already know it's going to fit since this is going to be mostly symmetrical at least for the part where it mates to the bottom part I do draw these two Center lines so I can mirror stuff left to right and top to bottom later on actually start drawing out both halves in this one sketch but in a second I decide that I'm only going to sketch one half and then just mirror the photometric part instead of creating the sketch twice I do go over most of the edges that aren't functional with a fella tool just make it a bit friendly to touch and then I at the center guide which is just a very simple sketch as well so I first add the block and then cut out the center slot from the additional material and that also cuts it out from the material that has already been there of course the nice thing with parametric head like this is that he can always go back and change a few dimensions if you find out that it doesn't quite fit that it doesn't quite work or if it just looks wrong you can always go back and it will auto-update all the rest of your design right and this is what I love about 3d printing you can just draw something up make a quick print this was literally 45 minutes to print and just see if it fits see what changes you need to make you don't need to worry about getting it perfect the first time because it's so cheap and fast to just prototype it and go through it with an iterative design approach in this case is actually pretty close to where I want the part to be but it's a bit snug I think the wings on the side are a bit too tall so I actually go back in and make those a bit slimmer I also widen up the center channel for that Center guide on the bottom a bit because that felt like it was binding a bit and I did shorten up the entire added section in the center just make those flaps a bit easier to press in all the way to release the buckle again from the main mount so second iteration of this part right here this already fits much more easily much better I do feel like the flaps are a bit too thin now so I back off of that correction a bit and that I think is good to move on to designing the actual foam mount so the basic idea here is that the clip and the phone mount itself are completely independent parts so the idea is if I ever want to change the mount underneath so that I can mount it to something else or if I ever change the phone that I can put in here I don't have to work off of the same part I can just take one and leave the other intact also it makes it much easier to print I don't have to worry about layer orientation for example for the clip you want the layers to be flat but for the phone mount you want them to be perpendicular to those so it wouldn't be possible to really print those in one print anyways and just having two screws in there is really simple at first I went for countersink screws but later on changed apart to fit a thin head screw this is actually a screw that's used in the open builds system of linear rails and that's just to three holes through the clip and those just go into a block basically there's gonna be hidden away once there's an actual phone in there and once it's actually installed in the car I'm not going to be using any threaded inserts any nuts or anything I'm just gonna tap the plastic itself which because this is such a long thread this is almost twenty millimeters of thread in the plastic and it's an m5 so it's a relatively coarse one that is fine like you can directly screw into plastic part like this and it's going to be plenty in fact it's going to be almost as strong as the screw itself which is exactly what you want it to be for the actual phone mount I'm mostly eyeballing the dimensions here I know the g6 is 72 millimeters wide so I guesstimate a radius I know it's not perfectly radiused edges but an 8 millimeter radius should fit later on I changed it to seven millimeters just to be a bit more snug but what I'm also not quite sure about yet is what that aperture angle up front with the flaps that actually wrap around the phone should be so I go in here I change it to three different sizes sixty forty five and thirty degrees exploit these three files and I'm gonna print just a few layers of these to give me an idea of which one fits best and the winner of those three is what I'm gonna be using for the final design so well that's printing downstairs I came back out here to the car to actually check out what the angle should be that the phone is mounted to so if you just mounted with a straight and ninety degree angle like this you can see that this looks this looks awkward like this is sticking out it looks like it's actually tilted down from my point of view if you actually have it like this where I perfectly fits in from this perspective at least if I'm really close to sitting over here I'm seeing the sky reflection from out in the window however if I should lean back to where I'm usually driving from that's fine so that's a good position so that roughly looks like a another 20 degree angle 25 degree angle to me good thing about 3d printing is we can iterate we can try things out so yeah I think I'm just gonna go with a 20 degree to start with and then just like the phone fit we can have different sizing options and just try them out all right so to get that actual angle into the part we're printing you may have noticed that I'm not designing this into the sketches itself but I'm actually drawing up the part separate from the main body that's gonna screw down to the clip and then I'm using the translate functions to rotate it back to dip it back 20 degrees and then to move it into position exactly where I want it to be at the block that's gonna attach to the rest of the clip and that makes it much easier to change later on and to iterate just like the clip itself so let's check out how that turned out so the tightest of these three Clips the 60-degree one is way too tight like you can tell it snaps a 45-degree one is a okay it's still a bit hard to insert and take the phone out it still holds it pretty well and doesn't break but my favorite here is the 30-degree one so this one snaps on nicely it holds the phone perfectly and it's not gonna break over time so that's what I'm going for all right I'd say these files are ready to print I'm gonna print the fun parts in APC ABS from a printer Pro I could also go for the flame retardant one but if this starts catching on fire I've got bigger issues to deal with now for these fights I'm actually doing two really cool things in the slic3r Purusha edition first off I'm using different print settings in one print between the phone clip and the mount for the GoPro played for the phone clip I'm giving it eight solid layers top and bottom as well as an extra perimeter shell to give me a bit extra meat to tap into because those two holes at the bottom those are going to get tapped so I'm taking material away from the edges there our thing is that I'm also enabling the option to complete individual parts that's going to print the clip first and it's entirely and only then start printing at the first layer again for the actual phone clip and that makes the part surface a bit cleaner and also results in stronger parts because the PC abs doesn't have as much time to cool between layers alright I came out here for the sunset but this is rather unimpressive give me a second we can fix that yeah better all right while we're out here let's take a moment to thank today's sponsor Squarespace Squarespace is the easy way to get yourself seen on the internet whether you're creating a portfolio for personal work or you're wanting to set up an online store Squarespace lets you create the website that is right for your needs they will take care of the entire tech back-end for you there's nothing to install upgrade patch ever simply choose one of their award-winning themes add your own content and it's going to look professional no matter if your visitors viewed on a smartphone or on a big desktop monitor so head over to squarespace.com slash summer for a free trial and a 10% discount offer your first purchase Thank You Squarespace [Music] [Music] all right so before we glue everything down let's actually do a quick dry fit so this mount by itself pretty perfect so there's a bit of a gap up top that's fine let's try with the adhesive and the bottom mode right here that's getting a bit tighter so you can actually see it's pushing up the dashboard right there but I mean I think I actually like this this is super solid in there like we'd put a phone in here so that's like it's part of the car now I'm gonna reprint this anyways because it's slightly warped but when I do I can just move this entire part down a bit more so we get a bit less tension on this part right here oh god I don't know what he said versus how did I get it out okay this is no no oh okay that took out a part of the soft rubber coating right there but whatever like this insert I mean it's got scratches and stuff anyways replacement points for this card cheap all right quick wipe down quick degrees to make sure everything sticks all nice and well supposedly you should heat this up before sticking it down but I think as is it's gonna stick well enough already there we go that's looking good okay this is never coming out on it so let's clip this in cool that actually slides in nicely bone okay let's take it for a drive okay Google spiel a Tokyo machine of Spotify in machines via ten all right so this project turned out even better than I expected the holder is super easy to use pull the g6 in there perfectly and it actually looks super clean as always if you want to make your own version of this I'm sharing the design files for free in the description below you can even make your own changes and add it to your phone or change the geometry to fit your car or horse carriage I mean I don't know what you're driving if you learn something I simply found the video entertaining give it a thumbs up if you want to see more like it check out the channel get subscribed and to hit that Bell so you don't miss out on new video uploads and if you really love the content consider supporting on a patron with as little as it all it per month thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Thomas Sanladerer

Views: 418,158

Rating: 4.846529 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printing, Tom's, 3D printer, RepRap, guide, LG, G6, Satnav, navigation, tuning, upgrade, car

Id: Fgbxgz5S2dc

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2018