Personal collective of ideas, thoughts and notes
A fun 3D print to Carbon Fiber project.
Designed in Fusion 360, 3D printed a mould and did a wet layup in Carbon Fiber. Pretty happy with the way it came out and impressed it held up even on the really rough NZ chip sealed roads!
There was a lot of trial and error on this due to the deep cavity and needing a vacuum to hold the material in place.
This is my second pass at producing something strong enough and reliable enough to put onto my triathlon bike, and in this case some carbon fiber arm rests. My current arm rests pretty much did the job but at 300+g for the set, it seems like an easy win to reduce weight by making something similar out of CF.
The design for these took quite a lot of time, lots of trial and error and mistakes along the way 🙂 Cardboard cutouts, angles and long prints were the most tedious aspects, but ultimately I think they came out OK in the end.
Ideation and prototyping Steps
Tool/CAD Design
Mould 3D printing
These moulds had various finishes I was testing, everything from raw prints to epoxy coated.
After having some reasonable success in #D printing moulds and doing some layup in CF, I thought I would attempt a “forged” CF version of a part I have 3D printed in the past. Unfortunately it didn’t quite go according to plan, it ended up weighing close to 4 x more than the basic version. A fun experiment none-the-less!
After years of dreaming and ideating around making carbon fiber products of some sort, I finally had a need to build some custom parts for my triathlon bike. After spending a considerable amount of time reading, watching and listening to tutorials online, I took the plunge and purchased some starter materials. My initial plan was to work with 3D printed moulds and do wet layup.
I purchased a 3D printed started kit from Easy Composites. The shipping was a little expensive (they are based in the UK) but seemed to have the best products, prices and matching material requirements for my needs.
My first project was a simple chain ring cover (which would be the next version of the 3D printed aero cover I 3D printed here). The purpose of this cover is to streamline airflow over the crank while in motion to reduce the bikes Cda (Coefficient of Drag). aka. More slip streamed.
I tend to be more and more interested in open source hardware. Between the resonable PCB printing and cheap components, this category of DIY is becoming increasingly popular. Here is a cool project where the hardware and software are ripe for a summer project:
The Arduino was one of my first “modern” introduction into the world of open-source electronics. The original use case for my DIY IGUS Time Lapse slider, then got used in the Quantum Double Slit Experiment to build a true Random Number Generator, and was also a part of my SAP DemoJam session. It always seems to be a great “go to” tool for interfacing with physical sensors, wiring something simple up or testing out different electronics.
I don’t use Cameo cutter much at all, so I was pretty disappointed to see it not working correctly when I wanted to cut some vinyl stickers for my bike project. The carriage would just slowly move to the right and stop. Turn it off and back on, and it would do the same until it hit the right side and make a terrible knocking noise as the position sensor did know where the carriage was.
Disassembling the unit and doing some online searching it seems the left stop sensor was bad. It is a Normally Open IR switch and after doing some extensive searching was able to find a replacement online. I mocked up the circuit board and cut a prototype on the Glowforge, did some very small soldering to wire it up, and it 100% fixed the problem.
Another 3D printed bottle holder for my Canyon Speedmax. This is a raised bottle holder for between your arms and mounts a traditional water bottle cage.
The typical distance between for the mount holes on cages are 64mm. 2 100mm M5 bolts keep the mount attached to a custom made carbon fiber base plate.
After reading about some aero gains from Crank covers, I decided to try and 3D print one to fit on my SRAM Rival crankset on my TT bike. The curves and irregular shape/profile of the crank made it difficult to model, so I printed a flat surface, and used heat to mold it to match the profile. It is held on via zip ties.
The design was done using Fusion 360 and a front and and side profile reference image. I printed this on a Prusa MKII.
This was one of my first prototypes. Due to the low melting point of PLA, a heat gun pretty quickly warms it sufficiently to get it to mold into the correct shape.
This was the final version.
EZGains testing results regarding covers and their benefit:
Not quite sure why I am so infatuated with wood and lego, but another small project, similar to the Lego Shelf.
Best part of this project was teaching CLT how to use all the woodworking power tools!
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