Hello again! Another month, another meatloaf!
This month i have been focusing a lot on making connections and getting my name out to people who might want to work with me, along with doing some mechanic work on the side, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been slacking on printing!
Progress on the corvette is going well, i got a huge part checked off, my custom intake!
I won’t lie I’m quite proud of this one. I tried using a new material for this part and it’s impressed me quite alot. The green material you see here is called TPU, it’s a flexible thermoplastic and is incredibly durable, since it just bends under force instead of shattering. I had tried printing this material years back but due to a combination of a bad printer and worse material, i never got results i was happy with. I’m glad to say that the material has come a very long way in the years since i last tried it, a large part of that development has been thanks to the battle-bots community funnily enough.
By using TPU it will allow my intake to flex slightly as the engine moves under load, without the risk of the part shattering. The only rigid part i made is the white air-box in the center, as i needed something solid to mount everything onto. Having a white part in my engine bay might have been a poor choice, but I’m a sucker for the way it looks and the only way to know is if i try it!
I placed a supporting rib down the center of the airbox as well as in the short piece shown in the 2nd picture. That part is just to step up the intake so it clears my fan shroud. The center rib should prevent my intake from collapsing on itself under vacuum from large throttle inputs, i am unable to flatten it even by hand so i’m confident it will work. If it ends up deforming too much and restricting airflow i’ll go back and reinforce it, either with a center rib or thicker walls, but i wanted to allow for as much airflow as possible so i left the inside hollow.
All in all i’m very happy with how this one came out. i learned some new modeling techniques to get the smooth transition between the rectangular port and circular ports, and I’ve truly fallen in love with this TPU, i have another part i want to make out of it in the works at the moment.
As a quick bonus, i also decided to make myself a custom knife grip for my every day carry utility knife. I challenged myself to model this one in an evening and while it took a couple test prints to get the curves right, i’m happy with how it came out.
I experimented with using a unique top pattern called “Octogram spiral” and i love the way it catches the light. I used it on a PETG-CF print which shows it much better.
That’s all for this month! I’m going full grease monkey on the corvette in the hopes that it can be done soon and i can start taking it to car shows to meet more people and show off what i can do! I’m looking forward to showing you all the next batch of custom parts i’m working on.
Thanks for reading, see you next month!
-Sparky
