3D printing dream car

A Kiwi computer programmer is building his dream car – a 1960 series II Aston Martin DB4 – using a three-dimensional printer in his garage. For the past year, the car’s body has been slowly emerging from a 300 3D printer at Ivan Sentch’s Auckland home. Working from a digital model downloaded from the internet, he has split its panels into hundreds of 10cm by 10cm pieces so they can be replicated by his small Solidoodle 2 printer, which slowly builds up the shape, layer by layer, with molten plastic directed through a nozzle. The shapes are then glued together to make moulds for fibreglass panels, which are mounted on a metal frame containing the engine, gearbox and suspension from a Nissan Skyline to make a working car looking the same as a DB4. It has taken a year to print the bodywork and Sentch will now start on the interior. He says: “The normal way of doing it is to mill the shape out of foam, which is too expensive, or to shape it by hand, which was too big an undertaking. By doing it this way, the final cost – including the printer, plastics and donor car – will be about $40,000.”

3D PRINTING HISTORY

The oldest 3D printers were built in the mid-1980s with consumer versions emerging in the past five years. Now the automotive industry could make greatest use of the technology. Dealerships may no longer have to keep vehicles days until a part is delivered – could they print it? Classic car owners won’t have to track down rare panels because replicas could be created from a copy of the blueprints. Ford embraced 3D printing after it printed an engine intake system in four days for US$3,000. It says a prototype component would have cost US$500,000 over four months. “We can go from art to part overnight,” says Matt Zaluzec, the marque’s global materials manager. TJ Giuli, leader of Ford’s research lab in California, is looking at how owners may be able to adapt their cars. “What we want to do is give people the same kind of acces­sibility they used to have for tinkering with their car maybe when it was the 1950s or 1960s. “We’re interested in seeing how you can use techniques to personalise your car in interesting ways.”