Post things here that you actually use, or something you fixed.

This morning I fixed a keychain fob for my father. He bought a used truck a couple of weeks ago and on the spare keys the lock button was missing.

I popped out the existing button, took a picture of it, did a quick and dirty vector in MSpaint, and ran it through windows 3d Builder, which by the way is an amazing and intuitive program for turning pictures into objects. The button in question would be a parallelogram with unequal sides and rounded angles and edges, so it would be difficult to model correctly without precise measurements (it being a small piece and made of rubber would make that tough) and probably a good deal of trial and error to get the fit just right. With 3d Builder I simply uploaded my cropped picture of the button and smoothed it, and out popped a very good likeness of the button. It even repairs broken models- very impressively, I might add. I'm beyond impressed with 3d Builder. This isn't photogrammetry, but I turned a simple vector into a very workable extrusion in about two minutes.

Given the simplicity of what I was going to do, I ran the image through Tinkercad, hollowed it, and added a small cylinder that was slightly shorter than the height of the button to trigger the activation switch on the key fob. The part is 4mm tall, with the activation switch piece being 3.6mm. The longest side is I think 16.9mm. For simple operations like this tinkercad is really fast. I'm not that good at fusion, so I normally have to RTFM to do most things other than the basics, and the setup alone would have taken me longer than to just import the model to tinkercad. The picture should make it fairly clear what was done. The artifacts in the corner are unimportant and too small to be printed, so I ignored them.



I took some quick and dirty measurements to scale it, and printed it from TPU. While it's nowhere near as flexible as rubber, I figured that would work. This is my first time using TPU and it was very easy to use, despite what I've been told. That said this is a tiny piece with minimal retractions, but the print looked very good and the part had the properties I was after. Most of the stuff I can think to make TPU from would be tiny seals, shock absorbers, or the like anyway. I used some cheap Tronxy TPU from amazon.

Pops right in and works with no problems, first try. The button is still tactile enough to make a clicking noise on use.



A little paint pen on the button and it's almost decent looking.



We'll see how it holds up over time, but for a 7 minute print and about ten minutes of work, not bad.

Printer for this was an Ender 3 with Titan geared extruder clones to handle flexibles.

Ill try to post a pic of my latest project, but they broke something when they updated the site to this format and havent been able to post pics since.
Havent tried in a long time so worth a shot.



ETA Not looking good lol



ETA2 another swing and miss lol

I could pull the url out & see the pics. What kind of material can handle engine compartment temps as an intake manifold?

Those are just PLA mockups to get the geometry and fitment right.

Apparently PLA will work similar to lost wax casting so scaling a set up a few % and giving them to a buddy to cast in aluminum.

I wouldnt expect them to work as-is for very long at all. Guessing the flanges on the head would distort and start leaking before it even got up to temp
There are some printable materials that would prob hold up though, nylon or polycarbonate would prob do it, but they are expensive and tricky to print so I dont mess with them.
Some day I might give weed eater line (nylon) a shot. Cheap way to play around and do some testing.

Cool!

Is kinda surprising what it can do sometimes.

Im a mech and was replacing an intercooler one fine friday.
Was toward the end of the day and wrapping things up when I noticed that the port for the map sensor was the newer small hole, but car had the older larger map sensor.
This shit always happens on fri eve

No time to order a new sensor so I just drew up and printed an adapter block so they could have their car for the weekend (was a buddy of mine).
Didnt expect it to last long, and planned on revisiting it properly at our earliest convenience, but you know how that goes
Its been on there and fine for the last 3yrs now That one might be in petg though.