Oddball question for the resident garagistas.

[Zynerji]

A friend of mine is in process of building a 36x36x84 inch core x/y style 3d printer with the sole intention or making large car parts. We were chatting about the possibility of pulling a single-seater chassis out of a printer that large in a single carbon-fiber nylon (or whatever) print.

Then the discussion got interesting. Apparently GM built a hybrid transmission with an integrated 160hp electric motor. The thought then came up about just bolting that trans off the tail of a printed chassis, and just hanging batteries on the side, along the floor.

I know it was just a tongue-in-cheek joke at the time, but it's been in my head all day.

Any thoughts from the engineers here about this idea?

https://www.transmissiondigest.com/gms- ... mission-2/

[Billzilla]

A plastic filament printer is never ever going to be able to print a strong enough chassis. Well, maybe for an RC car but certainly not a full-sized one.
Best off looking at the metal 3D printing systems that SpaceX have, they work very well on printing various parts for rocket engines.

[Zynerji]

A plastic filament printer is never ever going to be able to print a strong enough chassis. Well, maybe for an RC car but certainly not a full-sized one.
Best off looking at the metal 3D printing systems that SpaceX have, they work very well on printing various parts for rocket engines.

I'm not worried about the chassis! I'm asking about this transmission!

I can weld up some pipes to mount it to. The question is how reasonable it would be to run it as an EV driveline. Mounting to a well printed, acetone smoothed, bed liner sprayed monolithic tub is rather inconsequential to the point.

Any speculation about the transmission?

[Stu]

If I was going to do this I would use the FWD version, but mount it longitudinally providing 4WD and two axle regeneration. With the ‘right’ battery packaging you could end up with a very compact Auto-solo/Sprint-Hillclimb car (depending on whether you are UK or US based). The bell-housing is tailor-made for direct mounting to a bulkhead.

[Zynerji]

If I was going to do this I would use the FWD version, but mount it longitudinally providing 4WD and two axle regeneration. With the ‘right’ battery packaging you could end up with a very compact Auto-solo/Sprint-Hillclimb car (depending on whether you are UK or US based). The bell-housing is tailor-made for direct mounting to a bulkhead.

Good call. I kind of didn't even dig into the mountings on the FWD one. I was more interested in if the RWD one would hold up as a stresses member.

The FWD used as AWD is a killer idea! Thanks

[PhillipM]

A plastic filament printer is never ever going to be able to print a strong enough chassis. Well, maybe for an RC car but certainly not a full-sized one.
Best off looking at the metal 3D printing systems that SpaceX have, they work very well on printing various parts for rocket engines.

Off topic here but ironically a massive amount of research has gone into printing rocket parts with those little plastic filament printers and they work surprisingly well, even for motor nozzles.