As some of you may know, I work at Shapeways, the 3D printing factory and marketplace. Many of you print parts with us, and I am in the lucky position to see many of them pass through our factory on a daily basis. Now I've been bugging my colleagues with stories about RC cars for years, getting very excited when I see a part I recognize and telling them all about it. My love for RC cars has been picked up by our community manager, and together we've been scheming a plan on how we can build a RC car to showcase 3D printed parts. I remembered Pintopower's SuperFly Hornet project on Tamiyaclub and how the car was just filled from top to bottom with very nicely designed 3D printed parts both functional and aesthetically. I contacted him about our project and he kindly agreed to help us build one.
With this build we (Shapeways) want to demonstrate what is possible with 3D printing for the RC car community, and share some tips&tricks along the way about how to post-process the parts, deciding what material to choose, how to paint stuff, what software to model in, etc. We'll be shooting a video every week documenting the build as well as share a bunch of pictures and blog posts. When the car is finished we'll take it to events, and I might take it to some RC races as well.
So a couple of weeks back I ordered a Hornet and a big pile of 3D printed pieces, and today we finally kicked off the project.
As some of you may know, I work at Shapeways, the 3D printing factory and marketplace. Many of you print parts with us, and I am in the lucky position to see many of them pass through our factory on a daily basis. Now I've been bugging my colleagues with stories about RC cars for years, getting very excited when I see a part I recognize and telling them all about it. My love for RC cars has been picked up by our community manager, and together we've been scheming a plan on how we can build a RC car to showcase 3D printed parts. I remembered Pintopower's SuperFly Hornet project and how the car was just filled from top to bottom with very nicely designed 3D printed parts both functional and aesthetically. I contacted him about our project and he kindly agreed to help us build one.
With this build we (Shapeways) want to demonstrate what is possible with 3D printing for the RC car community, and share some tips&tricks along the way about how to post-process the parts, deciding what material to choose, how to paint stuff, what software to model in, etc. We'll be shooting a video every week documenting the build as well as share a bunch of pictures and blog posts. When the car is finished we'll take it to events, and I might take it to some RC races as well.
So a couple of weeks back I ordered a Hornet and a big pile of 3D printed pieces, and today we finally kicked off the project.
Because today was the first day of our project, and we immediatly wanted to shoot our first video as an introduction of the project for the Shapeways social media, I had to build the original Hornet kit in one night. I finished the car at 3AM last night and made it just in time. Here's some pictures of the progess.
The first step is the rear gearbox. I was surprised to find that the Hornet gearbox has a diff in it, I was expecting a spool. I also decided to use M3 stainless buttonhead screws everywhere with pre-tapped thread in the entire car because it looks better and is easier to work on in my opinion.
You can also spot the 3D printed toolholder I designed for my Hiro Seiko tools
Makes my pits so much neater.
The finished gearbox with the original RS540 installed. Not sure what motor will end up in finished car, maybe a Sport Tuned because it looks good? Don't want anything fast.
Couple minutes later and the rear end is complete. The rear dampers are what you'd call interesting. A strange mix of brass bushings, internal springs and very hard rubber o-rings. Not sure if it's functional though, so I'm glad we're going to modify the car.
Don't you just love Tamiya manuals? Still the best in the bizz'.
Moving on to the front suspension, but first; Hot coco break!
And here's the stock suspension. No adjustment what-so-ever. But it works, and surprisingly smooth. I see why this was a kids' favorite back in the days.
Boy, the wheels were a pain in the behind to get into the tires, especially the rears. Because it was already way past midnight I missed the description in the manual on how to get them in...
Doh! Once my eye caught the image, the wheels were finished in no time.
With the chassis put together, it was time to move on to the body. Initially I wanted to create custom decals for the body to make it Shapeways branded. But because we're going to modify the car so intensely, I thought a fully original look would be a better contrast to the end result.
I spend quite some time cutting out all of the decals right on the edge of the print to have minimal clear vinyl between letters. Our kit is the black-metallic version, so every imperfections shows up very clearly on the black-chrome bodyshell.
The striping was very hard to do, as there's no real mark or indication on the body where to stick the decal. I messed it up a little bit here and there at first, but managed to fix the mistakes and have all the striping nice and symetrical without any airbubbles or folds.
Once I had all the decals on the body it was 3AM and I really wanted to go to bed. I finished the wing, driver and lights this morning before going to work.
This is me (with the beanie) and our community manager Ruud while shooting our first episode for the build series. You can see us unboxing a big box full of AmPro Engineering parts. Pintopower really came through for us, modifying some of his designs to make it work the way I wanted and allowing us to print some of the prototype parts that never made it into his shop. Thanks mate!
We filmed a conversation between myself and Ruud about why you'd use 3D printing to modify your RC car, my RC history and my drift car and offcourse why we chose the Hornet for our project. The video will be released early next week hopefully, the link I will share here offcourse. And next week we're going to start pre-assembly of the car so I need to order the last few pieces of hardware and the tires in time so we can start building the SuperFly Hornet.
Here's a shot of the finished original car. I'm super pleased with the result and almost don't want to tear it apart again next week... Almost.
And this is what it's all about! A massive amount of 3D printed parts, all of which you can find in the
AmPro Engineering shop on Shapeways. These parts have been printed in our White Strong & Flexible nylon material, and will eventually be polished and some of them dyed. I've ordered them in white so we can also show you some of the post-production here in the factory.
And that's it for now. I'm very excited I get to build a SuperFly Hornet, as I've been wanting to do a project like this for a long time and I've always admired the original SuperFly build. Hopefully I can show you guys more very soon.