"When designing something for small scale manufacturing, you usually end up with a product that can disassembled to be fixed."
I miss Local Motors. The idea of a DIY automotive manufacturing company devolved into a cute little driverless bus manufacturer for corporate campuses, and dissolved into ignominy after producing one of the most amazing off-road racing vehicles ever conceived: the Rally Fighter.
They went from that to this.
Apparently, they quit letting people vote on what to make, abandoning the wisdom of the crowd for the rationality of bean counters.
I have had people tell me that the engine in their car needed to be removed from the car to change the distributor cap, spark plugs, or oil filter. These kinds of engineering issues clearly are intended to make working on your own car impossible. I used a 40+ year old truck as my daily driver for years, and intend to bring it back to usability (I live right on the ocean, and the body has become afflicted with rust to an unacceptable degree), but am giving a lot of thought to remodeling. While my VW caddy managed to get many things done, the bed was too small for 4x8 sheets of material, which made me struggle to carry loads on top of the canopy (and to keep them dry in the monsoon season, i.e. fall, winter, and spring), and while the canopy was low enough to enable me to stack material on it, it was so low that getting things out from under it was like doing the limbo with an anvil in your hands.
Getting parts for 40 year old mechanically fuel injected foreign truck is also becoming more challenging. I have long ago replaced the headlight switch with a dash mounted toggle, gave up on the dome light, picked up all the pieces of the tail light lens and superglued them back together after bumping a stump, and etc. I considered just coating all the body panels with fiberglass, but the additional weight would turn the snappy little truck into a lumbering slug. I have a 3D printer, but snapping ~200mm pieces together to make a new body makes me giggle at the sheer absurdity of it. Neither would PLA, nor exotic carbon fiber blends, be able to support the ~1/2 ton or so I have lugged on top of that canopy in the past. While such a body wouldn't rust, it might blow apart in a stiff breeze. I have considered replacing the glued together tail light lens with a 3D printed one, but it's working fine, so I am not inspired to fix it.
I really want a robot arm I can mount that print head on that can print body panels, but I don't want to spend $40k on a robot arm either. It's kinda weird being between not being able to contemplate 3D printing something, and being able to actually 3D print something. Born too late to conquer the New World. Born too early to conquer the stars.
I have, however, in the last week gained access to a building with 5 garage bays at no charge, and my feeble neurons are both banging against each other as I struggle to conceive of possibilities.
I will come up with something.
Thanks!
That's the thing about keeping the old cars running, is that they are getting REALLY old.
My 1965 chevy pickup, a great truck, would be 57 years old today.
I am really thinking about making a truck
companyloose connection of parts producers that offer all the parts necessary to bolt together your own truck. However, we are probably on the edge of having floaty vehicles. So, what do you do?And i am unsure of the actual future need.
I don't feel we are going to do as much driving in the future.
And what i should be designing is small farm equipment.
You know, building a little dump truck... something like a Unimog
I just don't know.
Building a larger 3D printer is an issue of accuracy. The bigger the distance, the more the play in the bearings means being way off, and you have to account for metal bending. But, i think you could do this with a camera system that positions the print head via sight, and then just deals with the slop in the robot arm, or the flex in the gantry.
That's a purdy truck. I doubt I'll be able to get away with less driving, as I need to transport tools to jobs, and that I cannot do on a floaty thing, bicycle, or afoot. As to locating print heads, the Bambu Labs X1 Carbon has recently incorporated lidar, which is presently limited in that device to accurately siting the first layer of a print. However, I can see that lidar can quickly be extended in utility for such purpose as we discuss. Not being a coder, I will be pretty slow (or more likely remain incapable) to add such functionality, while better minds than mine might well do so with facility. Even a relatively wobbly arm compared to solid cartesian printers might produce accuracy within acceptable limits by using lidar to continually correct print head location. I sure hope someone is already on it, at least.
The unimog is a wonderful truck... if you live in Europe. It has attachments! Even a backhoe.
Unimog owners like to brag how they pull humvees out of the mud.
It has a geared wheel hub (so the axles are way up, but top speed is 50mph)
I would make one for america, but there are things i haven't found a good solution for...
like tires. Those tractor tires are great... if you are on the farm. Shitty if you need to drive interstate. Which you do a lot of out in the fly over states. So, what kind of tires? And that basically decides the rest of the truck.
I found one here last year, but it was $10k with bad brakes, and I have other objectives than squandering my fortune on Mercedes truck parts.