What's in the workshop? A 3D printer!

[MikkiJayne]

Originally Posted by steamship

Will you be having a "What's cooking in the kitchen?" thread, where we have to guess what the mystery printed object is for?

I've been doing that on Facebook

This machine has a print bed of 300x300mm so it won't do a foglight grille in one piece, but there are bonding agents for many of the printable materials which are as strong as or stronger than the material itself so its entirely feasible to print them in two pieces and bond them together. It would do a two-piece grille ok though.

I think I mentioned in the other thread that the challenge with the grilles is getting a good enough surface finish on them, and that's going to take some experimentation. I have some carbon fibre reinforced material which prints with a nice satin-sheen finish, but I don't know how durable it is, and its expensive. ABS can be vapour-smoothed with acetone, but its difficult to print and would leave a gloss finish so that would need painting to match the factory look.

Plus of course we still need to scan them in and manipulate the scan in to something printable.

Tbh the grilles project wasn't the primary reason for buying this machine - its more of a future aspiration at this point. Its main use is printing smaller functional parts like clips and brackets which can't be bought from Audi any more, such as the clips for the radiator breather pipe or the starter junction box. Maybe even door card clips, although that's a bit of a stretch but worth a try. Radio adapter plates too.

Oh, and the brake master cylinder brace which I will post up shortly