Working with 3D printing replacement early A-body parts
Yeah it's very good stuff that holds up better than plastic from the 60s. That's honestly not a very hard bar to hop over
Let's see how it looks in twenty years of comparable environment.
The blind 3d printer hate is weird. You can literally print in inconel. You can use damn near any material
The blanket '3D printing solves every problem and has no drawbacks whatsoever!' mindset is equally weird and ten times more ignorant.
You clearly haven't been in charge of R&D products where some dipshit committee decides, 'oh hey, my kid got a 3D printer for Christmas, let's just start making parts using that process!" and then tells you that's how parts get made these days, despite your protests and logic. So you spend six months designing parts, re-designing parts to accommodate shear lines, dimensional incongruities, supply-chain QC issues, and performing endless failure mode analysis, so the committee can decide 'oh crap, it's not apples to apples like the 3D printer salesman told us it was, and we spent way more on R&D than we ever would have spent if we'd just used what works!' even though that's what engineering told them in the first place.
It's great for keychains. It's fantastic for prototyping. It's even great for functional parts
if they're designed properly.
But you know what I noticed on my Ender 3? Not one 3D printed part on the thing. NOT ONE. That should tell you something....it's not perfect.
Make something with posts for thread cutting nuts. The 3-D printed part is going to struggle. Applied stress? Struggle. A part that originally needed to be Acetal? or ABS? Or Polystyrene? Struggle struggle struggle. It's not 1:1, no matter how much you want it to be. "It's got
additives" you say? Well, Brawndo has electrolytes. There's a million different plastics out there because there's no one 'solves it all' plastic, and there's no one 'solves it all process'.
You can't just say, 'hey this part is great in plastic, we can make it using 3D printing instead' any more than you can say, 'Hey, this crankshaft is great in steel, we can make it using aluminum instead' or 'hey this deep-sea submersible is great in steel, we can make it in Titanium and Carbon Fiber instead!'.
I when I see blind love for something, anything, without consideration for the engineering behind it.... I know where that logic is headed.....
Now, go print me some lower control arm bushings, if 3D printing is so flawless.