Finding the best material from a color, texture, strength, and stiffness standpoint was a long process. We found a material that met our performance targets that was a purer ‘black’ with a better finish.
This testing led to slight changes in the design in order to greatly surpass the strength and stiffness of the OEM part. The tab area was made thicker with thicker bracing, and the radiused edges were changed along with the shape of the interlocking ‘tabs’.
The redesigned tabs are now virtually impossible to break by hand, and yield by bending rather than snapping like the OEM tabs.
With the final design extensively tested and refined, I am now confident that this new 3D printed Door Frame is significantly stronger than OEM in every aspect and features:
-Thicker mounting tab interface
-Thicker and relocated mounting tab “rib”
-Radiused mounting tab braces
-Revised and strengthened OEM interlocking tabs
-Radiused rear tab “pocket”
-Relocated longitudinal “ribs”.
CONCLUSION
Overall, I am extremely happy with the end result of this extremely durable Door Frame. It was a long journey and a steep learning curve to develop this solution to cracking NSX Lower Door Frames, but it was a lot of fun to learn a new skill set that will continue to benefit the build of Project NSX.
Stay tuned for the exciting things we have coming up.
5 comments
Have you looked into black PEI like ULTEM9085? It’s pretty amazing for a FDM material. We have a lot of parts made with it, but we aren’t printing it ourselves so I don’t know if it’s something limited to the very expensive commercial/industrial printers.
Any chance you could share those stls?
You guys should try a Nylon CF like Esun EPA CF. the layer lines basically dissappear and you wont need to worry about car temps. I can promise those will deform on a hot day when you pull on the door card.
Nice work! Getting dangerous there with the CAD 🙂
How do these hold vs mita motorsports’ version?