Towards the *fully* 3D-printed electric cars.

For a hobbyist trying to design/build their own electric vehicle acquiring or fabricating the chassis is literally the least difficult part of the job. Why would you want to make it _more_ difficult

Why bother, it's not like high performance electric motors are rare.

Insisting that every part of a homebrew EV also be 3D printed at home from one's personal 3D printer is a t*ts-on-a-bull project for turbodorks.

Yes, everybody should build their own car, DIY.

Why would you need transmission? Tesla uses gear, no transmission. My Maxwell 2020 use wheel hub motors, no transmission and no gear.

Yes, 3D printed aluminum would be too expensive and unreliable. Much cheaper to die cast.

[snip]

Similar principle as 3d printing, GE Additive is making jet engine parts

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

Nanotech was the hot wave of the future 10 or 15 years ago. Aren't people tired of buckyballs and nanotubes and graphene yet?

But you couldn't 3D print a copper coil or a supermagnet or a ball bearing. And additive is *slow*.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Arm waving nonsense.

You need multiple 3D printers if you need to print with multiple materials.

Consumer 3D printers print small parts from cheap plastic and cost hundreds of dollars.

Industrial 3D printers that print large parts with metals cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the printing material costs more than raw metal stock.

3D printing is advantageous for parts with complex shapes that are difficult or impossible to make with other techniques but is disadvantageous for most parts that ARE manufacturable with conventional techniques as they can be made faster and cheaper. 3D printing makes PARTS that still need to be assembled. 3D printing an electric motor is just silly.

--
Jim Pennino

I'm generally in agreement with all of the above. That motor which was

3D printed is a toy. That toy motor is far simpler than a stepper motor, so any thought of 3D printers printing other 3D printers is just a fantasy at this point.

Today's "state of the art" of 3D printing does not make it a panacea for manufacturing. Furthermore, 3D printing with locally produced (non- earth) materials is decades away.

But progress is being made in the field. GE is working on producing a

3D printer capable of printing 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter parts. This is coming from its aircraft engine division. 3D printing is a very hot topic these days.

Jeff

--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.   
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,  
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

3D printing requires special raw stock manufactured just for 3D printing no matter what the print material is. 3D printing is slow and expensive compared to any other method of making parts so only become economical if the part in question is so complex that 3D printing it is cheaper than any other method.

The cost and speed of 3D printing will obviously never match that of stamping out sheet metal, casting, or NC machining.

Yes, for very complex parts that would otherwise have to be made in pieces then somehow assempled.

--
Jim Pennino

Actually if the 3D printed part replaces many other parts (e.g. SuperDraco engines) then it's faster to print than it is to manufacture and assemble all those other parts. But that does fall under your "so complex" exception because in that case it is cheaper to print than try to use other manufacturing techniques.

In aerospace, think things like liquid fueled rocket engine combustion chambers with lots of tiny internal cooling passages. Those are a p.i.t.a. to make using conventional manufacturing techniques, but a breeze to 3D print.

For "trivial" parts, that is true. I installed a new garage door at home a few weeks ago. Lots of stamped sheet metal parts there, even the hinges.

Exactly.

Also, the other option that 3D printing opens up is more shape optimized parts. These things are optimized so that "useless" mass is simply gone from the design. They tend to look "organic" rather than "machined" due to their complex shapes. I've heard this called "light-weighting" parts from management types.

Jeff

--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.   
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,  
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

And the total market for such things is a tiny fraction of all things manufactured, or even of all 4 slice toasters manufactured.

My estimate is that for all things manufactured parts that can be made cheaper and faster by conventional means amount to about 99.99%.

And about the only place where weight matters that much is in things that fly and in that case useless mass is already gone from the design without the expense of 3D printing.

Have you ever looked at the interior structures of an aircraft?

3D printing is, and always will be, a niche manufacturing method.

Handy at times, but certainly not a world changer.

--
Jim Pennino

current ones do. Hopefully that'll change. Feed it your washed broken dustpan, it'll see how stiff the plastic is and at what temp it softens, work out what plastics it could be and print something suitable from your wish list. It most likely will happen.

Today it is, because bent sheet has been around so long. Imagine having a 3D printer at home that produces all your plastic goods. You never need buy plastic item again. Doesn't matter that it takes all night to produce one item.

...Today

It matters everywhere because material is cost

It sounds like you've not seen 3D printed houses, done in hours each. Now there's another mass market for it.

NT

3D printers are a part of the process. They give you the ability to generate shapes that cannot be easily machined and that opens up a lot of new possibilities. Possibly an air bearing to replace the ball bearing.

Granted jet engines are low volume high dollar items but with bigger build areas you can print multiple copies of the same part at the same time. Most CNC cannot do that. You CNC build 1 part at a time but rather fast. If I can print 10 parts at the same time on the same machine at < 10x the CNC time then I'm ahead of the game and I get complex shapes the CNC cannot do.

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

And the world will only need 3 computers. Usual Chimp wisdom.

That's why we use carbon fiber on cars; because weight doesn't matter.

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar 
 territory." 
                                      --G. Behn

3D fab the compressor, too?

The bulk of an electric motor is made of stacked stampings, something like grain-oriented silicon steel. That's cheap to make and has good mechanical and magnetic properties.

Probably 100x the machining time. So far, additive is mostly demo mode, more expensive than conventional processing.

Additive fab is fine, but it's mostly hype now.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Kiss my ass Red Herring McTroll.

"Where's the Affordable Carbon Fiber Automobile?"

"While the cost of carbon fiber materials and production has declined in recent decades, it remains prohibitive for anything but limited applications in niche vehicles."

--
Jim Pennino

• Transmission not needed; look at the Tesla.

• GACK! A DC motor with commutator! How gross. The working part of the engine should be exactly like the armature in the Tesla car: design is same as armature in an AC shaded pole fan motor. That design would not be too difficult for a 3Dprinter.

You're all ass, Chimp.

Oh, it's not just "things that fly" anymore. Now it's 'affordable'. My car has carbon fibre parts. I thought it was pretty affordable.

That would, according to the Chimp's prior statements, no doubt be the flying cars, since flying vehicles are the only ones where weight matters that much (according to him).

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar 
 territory." 
                                      --G. Behn

You're all nasty troll.

*PLONK*

--
Jim Pennino

"Nobody needs more than 640K"

I don't really think it's sensible to say "never" wrt technology - you're judging a very immature technology

The biggest problem wrt printing vehicles will, I suspect, be the legislation governing safety.