Kristof's Car(s)

[kristof65]

Decided I needed some retro futuristic hover cars. 

The Europa Magnus Station Wagon:


I also decided to create a cheesy vintage style advertisement for it. 


This was a quick sculpt (about 4 hours in Fusion and 3 hours on the printer).   The reason behind this car was that I wanted something relatively quick to print and prep that I could practice vehicle painting techniques on. I have no idea why I decided to make my first one in a retro futuristic style - I'm not even really a fan of that style, but I'm probably going to make some more. 

I've got some ideas for some other hover cars/trucks as well as some with wheels.  Since most of them will be simple one or two piece prints that will get knocked out in a few hours/days, I'll keep them all in a single thread. 
 

[hosercanadian]

Very nicely done.  But you made it a couple years too late. We were supposed to have flying cars in 2015.

 

I am follwoing your vehicle sculpts with a lot of interest, keep up the good work.

[kristof65]

2 hours ago, hosercanadian said:

Very nicely done.  But you made it a couple years too late. We were supposed to have flying cars in 2015.

 

I am follwoing your vehicle sculpts with a lot of interest, keep up the good work.

Those were Deloreans. This vehicle is glamorous!

Thanks!

[joshuaslater]

Nice ride!

[kristof65]

And I knocked out a design for a Delivery van tonight:

I'll try to get this on the printer over the weekend. 

I'm going to have to learn how to paint big flat pieces of glass. 

[kristof65]

Here's the print - but I forgot to take a picture of it before I primed it:

[kristof65]

The beginning of my latest car, which will be known as the Cowboy UV. 


I know, a block isn't much to look at, but I wanted to document the various stages this one will go through.  I have high hopes for this design. 

 

[kristof65]

And now it looks a little bit more like a vehicle.   I am loosely basing this one on an iconic real world vehicle. 

Edited February 15, 2018 by kristof65

[kristof65]

got a bit more done today between service calls:


I'm pausing at this point to print the pieces out in this rough form - I have some ideas that require me to get a better feel for the size and how the vehicle goes together.  Since it's a smaller model, just 85mm long and 34mm wide, it won't waste too much plastic to do that. 

[hosercanadian]

Do you print your cars solid or hollow?

 

I have a 3D printer arriving in a few months and I know very little on how to use

it...

[kristof65]

1 minute ago, hosercanadian said:

Do you print your cars solid or hollow?

both, sort of. 

When using the slicing program to create the gcode file that the printer actually prints from, you have a bunch of settings you can set, among them is the fill percentage. The higher the percentage, the more of this infill there is. My cars here are all designed as solid blocks, but when printing, I only print them at a 10-20% infill rate. In my slicer, the infill forms this weird triangular/hexagon pattern.  You can sort of see it here, on my Rottweiler post.  I'm starting this prototype print here in a few minutes, I'll try and remember to grab a picture when it's about half way done, so you can see what the 15% infill I used on it looks like.   

My larger vehicles, the tanks, I deliberately designed to be hollow so that they wouldn't use as much plastic.  My Rottweiler has  thick 6+mm walls.  If I had really known what I was doing, they wouldn't be that thick, but the shell command wouldn't calculate it out because I had already done a lot of exterior detail work before I made the decision to make it hollow. So I had to do it manually.

When deciding to make them hollow vs solid, you also have to consider how it will print.  Just like sculptors for traditional casting have to consider undercuts that are difficult to mold, when designing for a 3d printer, you have to be aware of how each layer needs to support the layer above it. If the previous layer can't support the next one because of an extreme angled overhang, or a large gap that needs to be bridged, then the print will require support material. 

Sometimes it's just easier to design something as solid than it is hollow, because supporting the hollow structure will require supports, and the support material can wind up using just as much plastic or even more than just using a low infill percentage - plus it can be difficult to remove cleanly. 

That's one of the reasons I'm doing an early prototype print here, I need to figure out if my design needs some different considerations for some overhangs. 


 

[kristof65]

This is what the infill looks like on my Prusa i3Mk2s using Prusa Control.

 

This is on the layer at about 5mm.

[kristof65]

My prototype print is complete. 

 

Happy with how it printed - I was concerned that the rear half would require supports on the fender well, which would have negated half the reason I split it where I did:

I split it there so I could have a flat surface to adhere to the bed, and hopefully be able to print without supports. You can see that I put some holes for pinning the two halves together with short pieces of left over filament.

 

The other reason I chose to split it there is because I hope I can turn this into a modular vehicle. With two different back ends, and two different front ends, plus two different sets of wheels, then I'll have 8 vehicle variations. That was my original plan, but I think the front bumper is going to need to be a separate piece as well. So if I do two front bumpers, that will give me 16 variations, with only 8 pieces.  

 

I made a quick list of different pieces I can do. If I do all 21 pieces, there will be over 500 variations.

 

[joshuaslater]

You done good.

[hosercanadian]

Thanks that was very helpful. I am sure I will fill a fair amount of my hobby time trying to figure out how to get things working properly when I printer arrives.