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Man 3D Prints a Working 5-Speed Transmission For Toyota Engines
ErnieKey writes A man named Eric Harrell has reverse engineered a 5-speed transmission for a Toyota 22RE Engine, and 3D printed an entire working replica on his desktop 3D printer. Even though it is made up almost entirely of plastic, he says that it could function as a replacement for the real thing. In all it took about 48 hours of print time, plus many more in order to assemble the device. He has made the files available for anyone to download and print themselves for free.
Exactly. I'm getting almost as tired of these bugus 3d printing articles as I am of the kickstarter ones.
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You put a load on it. Then it would be a bunch of dust. Now what is interesting is if you had one of those metal printers like they use for aircraft parts, this could get interesting for local mechanics in say 10 or 20 years if the price of raw material and printing goes down.
But aside from using the 3d prints to make molds for castings, I don't see what good this does anyone.
There are 3D printers that use laser sintering to print directly in metal. Materials include stainless steel, aluminum, and titanium. Metal printing is immature technology, and thus expensive, but that will change. For some specialty steels, and for titanium, CNC machining is difficult, and wastes material, so 3D printing will likely eventually become the dominant manufacturing technique for these materials.
Actual transmission gears are made from hardened steel. The parts, once cut have to be heat treated in order to withstand the extremes of actual use.
The plastic in a 3D printer is about the weakest form of plastic you will find.
I think 10 milliseconds was probably close.
You don't want to make gears by casting, you want machined metal, probably with heat treating. You could definately prove the design this way though, before building a real one.
I have to agree with hodet's point as well. I'm pretty surprised at the negativity of some of the Slashdot crowd regarding this story.
And the headline is accurate. They could have maybe added "replica" there to make it less click-baitish, but it IS a working transmission for his 3D printed, replica Toyota 22RE engine. The video shows it working exactly like a transmission should. Perhaps we have differing interpretations of the word "working"?
Still, the headline is the fault of the website, not the creator. He has done nothing wrong. On the contrary, what he has done is really cool.