Hubert Boillot Posted March 2, 2015 Posted March 2, 2015 Great ideas and realisation ! What is your printer : a SLA machine or an extruded filament one ? Btw, your sculpting techniques are OK. I wish I had only half of them ... Hubert.
brahman104 Posted March 2, 2015 Author Posted March 2, 2015 Hi Hubert, I have an Up Mini... not sure exactly what process it is, I guess extruded filament? I'm running ABS in it, not very well yet it seems! Craig
wunwinglow Posted March 2, 2015 Posted March 2, 2015 Well done Craig, for a first time this is great progress. I'm stuck at work just now, but I'll try and put something on the tutorial thread when i get home. Real life, and the need to pay the mortgage, can really get in the way sometimes.... Tim Derek B 1
brahman104 Posted March 3, 2015 Author Posted March 3, 2015 Thanks Tim! After a fair bit of stuffing around with the printer I managed to print a fairly decent LH nose side and am half way through attempting to print the right. You're not wrong, once you get a bit of a handle on the way Rhino works, it makes things pretty easy! I'm enjoying it a lot and I certainly look forward to your next tutorial I'll post some pics of the results (hopefully successful) soon Cheers, Craig
brahman104 Posted March 4, 2015 Author Posted March 4, 2015 IT'S A WIN! Well after several unsuccessful attempts at trying to print a decent set of left and right side nose halves, I managed to get something that I can definitely work with. I'm 100% sure the failures were operator error, as in a few of the failed prints the model broke away from the support structure during the print process. As the machine has no idea this has happened it continues to print merrily along and you end up strings of dried plastic all over the place! So I had the thought that if I increased the "footprint" of the design, it would be more stable. Seems that did the trick! This was then very easy to break away from the support structure or "raft." Each side took about an hour and a half to print, and this is what I ended up with... Offered up to the HK fuselage to test the fit. Pretty happy with that! Yes there is a small gap running down the bottom, but nothing I can't handle. Considering what I'm trying to do here, I am absolutely stoked with how it came out! Now I can crack on with the instrument panel bulkhead as I know everything lines up. This is good news as it means that printing the rear fuselage in sections and gluing them all together will be easily achievable and a really viable alternative to vacuum forming, which I was going to have to get sent away, with no assurances I'd made the master right! Thanks for looking, Craig Fencer-1, Derek B, leoasman and 1 other 4
CATCplSlade Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 Amazing work; I would love to see this sitting next to the original model to see the full extent of your modification. I think that would be pretty striking. I wasn't aware there was only one example remaining IRL. The 3D printing leads me to believe in the future we might be paying for a licensing fee to print one set of a particular kit plus cost of materials. What might that do to the pricing structure of kits if the costs of manufacturing were left up to the consumer - all the company has to do is get you to fork over some financial info and then click "download" to send some data to "that noisy crap" your wife makes you keep in the garage so they could be generating pure profit per set of CADs pretty quick if played right. Imagine being able to print out every variation of [insert cult favorite plane here] in an afternoon? YOU COULD KEEP SEVERAL LIFETIMES OF STASHES ON A FLASH DRIVE!!! How long until 3D printers are common as toaster ovens? leoasman 1
Hubert Boillot Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 Cool ! A question though. I thought one of the issues with the HK kit was that the nose section just ahead of the windscreen was not flat enough. Yours looks very rounded when mated to the kit, but one of the photos of the part on the platform may lead to think it has the flattened curvature. Hubert.
wunwinglow Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 I don't think 3D printers willEVER become household items; maybe in the workshops of nut-cases like us lot, but for the general public? No. What WILL happen though is universal access to 3D printing services. You can do this already of course, but the limitations on speed, time, accuracy, material qualities, surface resolution etc mean that Joe Public would not accept a machine that produces the kind of materials the current crop of 'domestic' printers produce. However, if local service providers can fund higher end machines that build quicker, better, smoother, stronger, etc, then we can all tap into that, without spending a fortune, for us, on machines that don't quite come up to scratch. Materials still need to improve, but things are moving in the right direction. What WE can all do though, is learn how to model in 3D CAD programs. As Craig and Peter and others have discovered, it isn't so difficult to get your thoughts onto the screen, and from then on, you can 3D print, CNC, laser cut, decal print, photo etch, and more, to your hearts content. But you HAVE to have the original data. Nothing works without this.... Tim Out2gtcha 1
seiran01 Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 Wow!! Not sure how I haven't seen this build until now but your efforts are very, very impressive. brahman104 1
Bill Cross Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 Are you going to commercialize this as an AM add-on?
brahman104 Posted March 4, 2015 Author Posted March 4, 2015 Cool ! A question though. I thought one of the issues with the HK kit was that the nose section just ahead of the windscreen was not flat enough. Yours looks very rounded when mated to the kit, but one of the photos of the part on the platform may lead to think it has the flattened curvature. Hubert. Hi Hubert, You are indeed correct about the flattening of the nose. When the printed nose halves are standing on their own, they do have a more rounded appearance to them due to the elasticity of the ABS, but I have devised a "proper" (to me anyway) shaped bulkhead that they will mate to around where the instrument panel sits. This bulkhead conforms to the curve that the lower fuselage of the kit has, then flattens out just below where the windscreen sides come up (if that makes sense). The difference is only about 2 or 3 mm from the HK part, but it is enough to make a big difference to the shape, so I will end up having longer/deeper windscreen panels which should correct that "offness" the HK kit has about it when you look at it from the front. I hope that when I post some pics of the I.P bulkhead you will be able to see the difference more clearly. Believe me, I've spent a long time trying to work out that very part! Thanks very much for your question Hubert, I hope my reply makes sense! Craig seiran01 1
brahman104 Posted March 4, 2015 Author Posted March 4, 2015 Are you going to commercialize this as an AM add-on? Hi Bill, I did think about it for a little bit, but probably not. The main reason is that most of this has been done by eye and what I think is correct; I don't have any really reliable plans to work from. The other is that while it could be done for those who might be interested, I'm not really sure how far you would go with it. Even with the printing there is still a massive amount of "old school" modelling that needs to be done, like the whole interior for a start! My intent is to make the rear fuselage in the same way, as well as the tail plane. This will save me a lot of extra work and time, and I will keep the files so they can be reprinted. I would certainly be happy to share those with anyone that was interested in doing this conversion, but I don't think I could ever make a "complete" conversion per se, I'm just not that clever! Cheers, Craig
brahman104 Posted March 4, 2015 Author Posted March 4, 2015 Wow!! Not sure how I haven't seen this build until now but your efforts are very, very impressive. Thanks for your kind words mate, I'm glad you've checked in on me Craig
Hubert Boillot Posted March 4, 2015 Posted March 4, 2015 Hi Hubert, You are indeed correct about the flattening of the nose. When the printed nose halves are standing on their own, they do have a more rounded appearance to them due to the elasticity of the ABS, but I have devised a "proper" (to me anyway) shaped bulkhead that they will mate to around where the instrument panel sits. This bulkhead conforms to the curve that the lower fuselage of the kit has, then flattens out just below where the windscreen sides come up (if that makes sense). The difference is only about 2 or 3 mm from the HK part, but it is enough to make a big difference to the shape, so I will end up having longer/deeper windscreen panels which should correct that "offness" the HK kit has about it when you look at it from the front. I hope that when I post some pics of the I.P bulkhead you will be able to see the difference more clearly. Believe me, I've spent a long time trying to work out that very part! Thanks very much for your question Hubert, I hope my reply makes sense! Craig Very clear. Many thanks for taking the time to answer. Hubert
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