I saw a program on PBS the other day about this company that takes your CADD 3D models and prints them for you, so you don't have to have a 3D printer at home. They then offer your designs on their site. I believe the company that was featured was called Shapeways www.shapeways.com I wonder if any of our smaller plastic parts would be feasible to be reproduced in this manner. There must be people on this board that can take 3D scans or render items in 3D to make CADD files to print?? I don't know much about this technology, but all I could think of was finding a cheaper way to make some parts for our cars. I was thinking of heater control bezels, consolette clock-delete plates, knobs and switches, etc. Heck, in the right hands we could probably even improve on some of the designs and eliminate the common failures somehow (e.g. broken heater bezel tabs). Has anyone used this or a similar service before?
We could make candy, or chocolate Mavericks. http://www.autoblog.com/2014/02/13/2015-ford-mustang-3d-printed-in-chocolate/
It would be nice Paul. In addition it would be cool if this technology would also do metals?.. sport mirror pedestals would be nice
someone over at vintage-vans is trying out this method as well. currently, materials and sizes limit the whole thing to smaller plastic parts, but quite a few come to mind that would be nice to see reproduced. what i was always thinking of were the plastic clips for the rocker moldings.
3 d printing is the wave of the future some companies can reproduce any size piece you want and they are going down in price 3000 to 3500 for a do it yourselfer to get in business if they have an original piece they can scan it for you you could even scan and reproduce the whole console the possibilities are unlimited
There's an open-source project 3D printer that does 24"x24"x24" in kit for for $3950 and assembled for $5450. After doing some light research, it looks like the consumables are expensive (~$50/kg) and print time is amazingly long. One vid I saw, it took 4.5 hours to print a half-sized armored knight's head...
3D printing is coming further and further. When I was in school for mechanical engineering, our lab had a new plastic 3D printer. We used it to print some plastic piece to use to make sand molds for Aluminum parts. Now days it's all higher quality, getting cheaper, and can even print metal (though not for high-strength parts...yet). I have the ability to model things in 3D CAD (but not scan parts in...that's expensive!), would be interesting to try that...
