Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed)

   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #31  
id do lots of cad work, and have a plasma table. setting up fo the cut takes 10x the labor as doing the cut. im sure this printer is the same. my main issue is not too many things on my tractor are plastic.

i have seen a video Jay Leno (not him, but his guys) make a plastic mold of a part he wanted, than cast a sacrificial form to the plastic mold, than make the part of cast metal. that was pretty cool.
I saw a video of Jay Leno talking to a company that does laser scanning that puts the part dimensions directly into format for printing from the scan. That was 2012 I believe.

Then he has another video of a company that can take a file like that and put it into a 3D metal printer. No plastic.

I saw another video of his many years ago where they scanned a right turn signal, mirrored it on the computer, and printed a left turn signal. They made a mold out of that and cast it in the proper resin for the lens.
 
   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #32  
Then there's this guy...

An article from 2018 when he was 87 years young and building his 3rd 3D printer.

I first met him when I was maybe 8 years old back in the 60s in Cub Scouts. Then I had the privilege to work with him at least 4 hours a day for 2 years back in the late 80's. He taught me a lot about electrical in the plant and machinery. I taught him how how to weld sheet metal with a torch. Those 2 years were probably when I learned the most in the shortest amount of time. Amazing guy. I saw him a couple months ago in a parking lot. Still pretty sharp!


 
   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #33  
5030 is one of the most insecure persons on this site bar none.He has all of the best equipment and everyone else's suck.Strange sorry little man to say the least.I know some folks who know him personally and they have the same opinion of him..

Yeah, he seems to have a different view on anything he comments on, which is most everything. Gets confrontational a lot too, got him booted from OTT. It's so civil over there now. Well, it is most of the time. :rolleyes:
 
   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #34  
Maybe I'm just too old. I order stuff all the time.
This is Surplus Center's catalog I just got with hydraulic couplers I ordered.
As you see caps are $1.75 to $3.25, from 1/4" to 1" coupler size.
Ebay a seller has them $12.99/pair free shipping, every color there is. They're made for hydraulic fluid.
No, I love fabrication and I not crapping on 3D printers...but something that inexpensive, something made for the job, something I can order in 5 minutes, no driving, mailed right to my door...it just doesn't make practical sense. View attachment 696549
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   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #35  
I bought a QiDiTech1 about 3 years ago now I think. Started making all kinds of useful things with it. I use Tinkercad to design things, and Simplify3D to slice them and generate the g-code files. I have tried using Fusion360 for sketching new parts, but it has a pretty steep learning curve, and I don't use it all that often.
I wanted to print a few things that were too big for the QiDiTech, so I build a Hypercube with 300mm cubed build space. I used a Duet ethernet board to power it, which allows me to send files to print to it over the network. I also put two RaspberryPi powered IP cameras on it so I can watch it while it's printing. Plugged it into a remote control outlet, like for outdoor Xmas llghts, so I can turn it on when I'm ready to send a file to it. I also connected it's power through a controller that shuts it down after the print is done, which is sometimes in the wee hours when I'm in bed.
I 3d printed a box I mounted on my BX that holds a TinyTach digital tach. I have made a lot of custom items for friends and family members. I even made a trolling motor mount to replace a crappy broken one for a friend of a friend, and another one for one of his friends that had the same trolling motor.
 

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   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #36  
I saw a video of Jay Leno talking to a company that does laser scanning that puts the part dimensions directly into format for printing from the scan. That was 2012 I believe.

Then he has another video of a company that can take a file like that and put it into a 3D metal printer. No plastic.

I saw another video of his many years ago where they scanned a right turn signal, mirrored it on the computer, and printed a left turn signal. They made a mold out of that and cast it in the proper resin for the lens.
So, what's the point? That rich people get other rich people with millions of dollars worth of 3D laser scanners and printers to do their stuff? I thought the whole point was printing things YOURSELF. :giggle:
 
   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #37  
Yeah, he seems to have a different view on anything he comments on, which is most everything. Gets confrontational a lot too, got him booted from OTT. It's so civil over there now. Well, it is most of the time. :rolleyes:
To bad he has to act like this..Some folks are just bitter & angry.
 
   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #38  
good question. i will let you know in a year.

based on my reading it has chemical resistance. I guess we will see.
If you print them in nylon they should hold up. I have a nylon lathe change gear for metric threading that I printed nearly 10 years ago and it still works just fine. It comes out of an oily drawer, goes onto an oily machine where it's meshed with other oily gears, subjected to more torque than a 3D printed part should be, then put back in the oily drawer more oily than when it went in.

If you're just getting into 3D printing and you want to print something other than nick-nacks, I suppose my best tips would be:
1. Carefully consider which in axis your parts will receive the most forces, and print them oriented in such a way that that is their strongest axis. Remember that the parts have a "grain" like wood and are bound to split if subjected to the wrong forces in the wrong axis.
2. Know your polymers and use the right tool for the right job. They all have different strengths and weaknesses and there are tradeoffs for all of them, no one-size-fits-all filament is available.

I got into 3D printing in 2013, with a bold and naive plan to build a 3D printed prosthetic hand for my dad and make it open source because bespoke prosthetics are incredibly expensive and not universally available. I quickly learned that 3D printing was not up to the task. Nobody then, and (my impression) nobody now, was interested in performing collaborative repeatable and qantifiable strength testing to come up with best practices to make functional parts. Everyone was content to print chess rooks and smash them in a vise saying "wow I got 3 good handle cranks out of that one before it exploded. Very strong part!" It's disappointing that little progress has been made on this front. I developed a test object and a testing procedure that I hoped could unify at least some small corner of the 3D printing community and get a few people going the same direction toward strong parts. There was zero interest.

Anyway, here's a sample of what my unending failures looked like; something suitable only for Mr. Glass:

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So I abandoned 3D printing and went after CNC milling. The prosthetic hand project fizzled out after a few years, not because i lost interest but because my dad did. Well, maybe I did too a bit, but mainly because I could tell he wasn't crazy about it. He went without a hand for 40 years and was pretty used to it. But, I still wanted a CNC mill so eventually I saved up enough to get one. I'm quite happy with it and only rarely do I clear the pile of debris off my 3D printer and put it to work. Every time I do, I have to put my filaments in the oven overnight because they sit so long.

3D printing is fun and exciting, and the cost of admission has come down so far that I would encourage almost anyone to give it a shot. But with a realistic understanding of its limitations. I am glad to see that you found a practical thing to make. Sadly, ideas for things like that no longer come to me as the 3D printing thought process has all but left the building.
 
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   / Sick of Paying Tractor Part Prices.... Make Your Own....(3D Printed) #39  
So, what's the point? That rich people get other rich people with millions of dollars worth of 3D laser scanners and printers to do their stuff? I thought the whole point was printing things YOURSELF. :giggle:
The point is the technology wasn't there a short while ago. It's progressing rapidly. And it's now very affordable for an individual or small business. You could get a scanner and printer for well under $3K to get started. People spend way more than that on, say, a drone, a snowmobile, a dirt bike, a boat, or, heavens forbid, a tractor attachment. ;)
 
 
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