Our LowRider kit is out for delivery, and we’re squealing with excitement! In the coming days we will order the tubes, and print and machine the parts. I am extremely fortunate to have access to a laser cutter, shop bot, waterjet, FormLabs Form 2, MarkForged Mark Two (with continuous strand CF), and many other fun toys. (Although since MIT just shut down we’ll see if I have access to any of it. )
My goal is not to build the world’s best LowRider, I’ve seen the quality of the work on this forum and my meager skills don’t hold a candle. However, I feel like I can help push back the darkness a little bit by exploring ideas which would be too costly to do without such easy access.
So far, I’ve understood that the challenges are weight, cost, availability, and high-tolerance jobs. (Which I think really shows the genius of V1Engineering, which has done a superb job of eliminating the hardest problems: design, calibration, and successful build completions.)
I’d like to have more insight into each of these four groups, to take a stab at seeing if the 80/20 rule (80 % of the gains come from 20% of the efforts) still applies here.
For instance, the weight of the endplates could be halved by making a tileboard/foam/tileboard sandwich, 4x8 sheets of which can be found for $10-20 at your local home improvement store. Making this accurately is challenging and time-consuming, unless you have a laser cutter doing the hard work. Then it becomes as easy as assembling legos.
Likewise, the MarkForged Mark Two prints using Onyx, a special Nylon/chopped strand CF filament, and can embed continuous strand CF into part layers. It’s way too expensive for doing the entire build, but if we knew that critical parts were the bottlenecks then this could provide a relatively inexpensive (5-$20) upgrade path.
I’d love to hear from you guys about your challenges before I click print.
Thoughts?