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When you just take plastic or metal 3D printed parts that simply replicate what is already mold/cast/machined, then you limit the advantages.
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what kind of background do you have, fab, mech, elec?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeMzRUT46RE[/youtube]
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I could buy every peice of plastic i will ever need for $3k, and have enough to have a good holiday.
For prototyping and development its a huge advantage in cost of time and tooling, no doubt , but there isnt a single bit of an MX bike that i would swap for something printed .
If you look at some of the stuff on YouTube , something like a mudguard would take 50 hours to print, and it would look shit into the bargain.
Dont get me wrong, printing has huge potential, but i dont think MX has the need for it , nor will it have. Parts are not intricate enough, or even difficult to make , and 5 Axis machining these days is easy come by, so the cost savings arent going to be enough to justify the huge investment.
We wanted to test some port designs that couldn't be machined into a solid piece, They are interesting, but the ports had to be extrude honed and the exterior machined to get the desired finish. The raw print slug has a very rough texture. Basically about a million sheets of foil fused together.
After it was all said and done, we figured we could have built the same thing in lost investment castings for less money and had a desirable surface finish right from the mold.
We have used some 3D printed plastic parts for prototyping from CAD drawings, just for fit and design checks before they final parts are machined, that has worked out well for us. But, I have yet to see any that was good enough to use in industry, straight from the printer.
It appears it will be some time before anybody has to worry about getting put out of business buy 3D printing.
They are impregnating layers of carbon into the build up. Certain strength characteristics are as high as aluminum.
Our parts are a little bigger than the current size of printer they have available. But I'm seriously considering buying one of these to futz with small stuff.
I used to work for Reynard, which started the BAR team that morphed into what is now Mercedes.
The very first show cars that were done well in advance of the real cars were built with a lot of 3D printed parts.
I was in Brackley when they were assembling them and the gearbox looked lke the real thing and it was completely 3D printed.
I'm now at Dallara in Indy, and we needed to make a change to the fuel funnel fairing where the guys insert the fuel probe to fill the car.
We had to create a new shape because it needed a more gradual lead-in to clear the guys' hands on the probe.
We 3d printed the new shape in reverse, then used that part to create a mould to manufacture the real parts in carbon fibre.
It really cut down on the time and expense that it would have taken to machine a master to pull the mould from.
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