MOPED ARMY

Hey Graham,

Sounds cool! Appreciate you offering to take a look at it. PM me your email and I'll send you an OBJ file to look at. I only opened it on my phone and played around with some of the features in a free app I found, but I'm really curious to see if this could be use for reproduction purposes. You'd know better than me.

Talk soon.

Andrew

Just got a 3D printer and have been fooling with various prints. Depending on what you want to produce, you may have to consider your materials.

PLA (which seemingly most people use) may not do well for long term use due to temperature swing, strength characteristics and the fact that it may break down after a while.

ABS or some types of nylon may be your best bet on some parts, however there are some trade offs with those. Some are harder to print successfully, but I think it's doable. Maybe print in PLA for mock up / fit then go from there? I'd be willing to give it a shot as well even though my printer won't handle much above 220mm or so.

I don't have access to Autocad, but have been playing around with Fusion 360 (free from Autodesk for a year) and so that may be an option for you / others. I've never dealt with 3D rendering / drawing before but it's pretty fascinating if you're into that type of thing.

Have any photos of the stuff you're trying to produce? I think there's a list in the wiki of moped related 3D print models available and I've even found one or two that aren't on that list.

I've been running an ender 3 for over 2 years now, it's fried 2 motherboards (one was due to operator error) and needed some basic maintenance but for the most part it's working great. I have a $6000 ultimaker at work and the ender prints every bit as good, just requires a little more dicking around sometimes.

You will definitely want a glass bed for doing any functional parts. There is a German guy on YouTube that has great tutorials and really explains stuff well.... Can't remember his name.

Most moped parts I run with petg, it's cheap and very rigid with good temp stability. I have run some stuff with taulmann nylon 6/6 which is fantastic but also very expensive and not much stronger, it's tougher so it's good for things that will see a lot of abuse. ABS I don't like because it stinks but it is really good for cosmetic parts like sidecovers that don't see a lot of abuse, it accepts paint and sands up better. It's very brittle and will crack with no warning.

Cool, thanks for the input. I'd do a bit more researching!

Yeah when I got into it, I made the decision that I didn't want '3d printing' to be my hobby, for me it's just a means to an end, I bought the cheapest thing I could and put all my effort into designing parts and getting good prints. If I had bought a bunch of stepper motors and junk It would probably still be sitting in a box in my office next to a million other stalled projects.

The real sophistication is knowing how to actually design a part, that's the hard part, knowing the material and understanding how the printer works so you can get the strength you need. If you actually want to make functional stuff, spend your time building your skills at the design part and let someone way smarter than you figure out how to design and build a printer.

Yeah, absolutely no interest in building a 3D printer when I started looking into it. I'm in Graham's boat, this is a tool, not a toy.

Given my available space restrictions, I decided on entering the printing world with a Prusa Mini, and I cannot tell you how satisfied I am with it. 7x7x7 is enough bed size for pretty much anything I can do, and self levelling bed, filament sensor, etc. are all dumby proof. I was leaning towards the Ender, but honestly was put off by all the fidgeting that people were having to do. I really wanted something that was fast to setup and get printing.

Using Fusion360/Prusa Slicer, it's basically the plug and play tool I wanted it to be.

After all this, I am using it to prototype some parts in both PLA and PETG, as well as a bunch of other hobby building stuffing, and I can't be happier.

Moped scale tends to make people think that they need a much bigger build area then you really need. It's all about smart building of your parts.