Split Decision | 4WD IDEA Split Angle Build

Cool stuff! Excited to see the layup.

So cool. A rare treat nowadays.

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Yep haha, the tech on the phone was incredibly helpful and clearly knew their stuff, we were able to narrow down on it either being the AC contactor or a safety switch for the belt drive top cover for the mill within 10 minutes (including hold time for him to find the relevant documentation and send it to me). Top notch service, and they never once questioned me on proof of purchase or anything.

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Annd, tonight, we start the first print of many. I will undoubtedly fuck up a few of these. The enclosure mold was segmented into six sections to hopefully make it less painful when one fails and decides to spaghetti monster my printer. Looks like this is gonna cost me about 3kg of filament with zero fuckups, so realistically i’m gonna end up using like 5kg. If everything goes well, the next step is to assemble the mold together, smooth out the surfaces with a fuckton of sanding and filling with bondo or whatnot, primer, more sanding, then figuring out what to coat this with to get a nice release from the carbon layup.

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Looks like you’re printing a buck ,are you gonna make a female mould off that? (To make parts in)

Im actually going to attempt to do the carbon layup directly off the positive mold, if that doesn’t work ill try printing a negative mold or using the printed positive mold to make a negative one.

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Cool. It’s definitely possible, maybe easier to get a better surface finish using a female mould but making it over a male mould is definitely possible. Less work too which is goood :call_me_hand:

do you have to bag it?

Have to? Probably not. But it’d definitely be a good idea to, so i will be haha.



My prediction was surprisingly on point. Thermal contraction, even with a 45C enclosure temp, is a bitch. The mold print pulled off of the bed and was unusable as a result of it being way too long and not having good enough adhesion. So, the solution? Account for the thermal contraction by removing long runs of material and give the part more surface area at the ends to adhere to the bed with.

Hopefully this fixes it

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Is that a glass bed? Don’t underestimate the power of a glue stick :slight_smile:

Textured PEI, the bed adhesion is fine, its just that the way the part was setup the contraction was waaay too much for it to handle, even with the brim - it straight up tore off the brim lol.

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So, just another update.

Even with the redesigned part, it still thermally contracts like a bitch. So, taking experience from my job as a pipe stress engineer, i’m gonna engi-muh-neer me a solution. Its called

“SHIT CANT THERMALLY CONTRACT IF I KEEP THE FUCKER HOT”

So, one temperature controlled programmable outlet and two of the shittiest space heaters with as little safety features as possible later?

Also running this on my CR10 smart pro which has a more even bed and normally as a result gets better bed adhesion.

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This is really just becomming a 3d printing rant. SO, guess what happens when you run a 3d printer in a hot environment? The cold side heatsoaks and soft filament jams up the extruder gears :roll_eyes:

So, one aliexpress watercooling kit later, and a proper enclosure… as well as a new PEI bed and some nanopolymer adhesive coating… we’re finally printing again. For now, slightly lower enclosure temp of only 40C to see if itll atleast print without jamming, hopefully the fresh bed and adhesive coating prevent any lift or peel.


As a sidenote, i did atleast manage to fix the mill and lathe, so im gonna be trying to make myself some parts this weekend.

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Update - fuuuck this. Bought a voron trident kit. Also split the mold up into 12 primary sections with four plates to hold them together.

Also, i still need to make the custom SRB hub adapters.

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350x350?

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Yup. I fairly regularly use my printers to make large parts (molds, test jigs, prototype parts etc). My current main printer is a modified CR10 smart pro, but ive also owned an elegoo neptune 4 max.

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This thread has been a fun read

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I’m glad my 3d printers blowing up in my face has entertained someone lol. Hopefully the new voron won’t be a huge pain in the ass, but if it is i’ll be sure to post it here.

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Courtesy of a friend with a bambu, the first successful section without any issues! Just uh… 11 more. Plus the four alignment plates, inserting the mating pins, and smoothing the seams between all the sections.

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While i wait to finish printing the enclosure mold… I’ve been messing around with different potential battery layouts

14S4P, uniform spacing. Packaging the BMS here may be difficult.

14S4P, non-uniform spacing to accomodate dual ESC’s and leave more space for BMS packaging.

16S using 4S lipos, two independent batteries

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