One of the little annoyances I found with my new XKR was that one of the threaded valve stem covers on my 20" BBS Montreal wheels was missing. I knew this when I bought the car. Finding replacements turned out to be a bit harder then I anticipated. So I decided to try reverse engineering one, and 3D printing it. It turned out pretty good. Not perfect, but for about an hour of messing around, it seems good enough for now. I measured and drew it up in Fusion360 a 3D drawing program from AutoDesk that has a free to use pricing tier, as long as you don't make money off of it. Then sliced it up and sent it to my 3d printer. Here are the results.




It's just a tad undersized, but I didn't want it to get stuck, so we will see how that goes. It also doesn't have any material to seal to the wheel, but I may try and find an O-ring or something to do that, but it is still better then nothing. It is made out of PLA, since that is what I had in the machine. If I find it is melting a bit, I may try another type of plastic. And now that I have it drawn up, I could always send it out to have it made out of metal, if I really wanted to. I may try and post the STL file here, but I don't think it is one of the ones that is allowed. I may also post this up on Thingaverse, a repository of a lot of 3d printable parts people have designed and shared over the years.

Oh, and yes I'm aware I need to clean that wheel. ;-)

 

Yep, .stl files are not allowed. If I put it up on Thingaverse, I'll put a link here.

 

John, just put the stl into a zip (compressed folder) file. If it's =< 5Mb it will attach.

Here's one of Apollo 11 from the NASA site

 

Thanks for the suggestion Michaelh. I will give that a go. I tried to edit the previous post to include it, but that didn't seem to work. So, I'll just post it here instead.

OK, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I go to advanced, I got to manage attachments. I load the correct file, I hit upload, it brings me back here. And I figured it would show up at the end after i hit submit, but it doesn't. Any ideas?

 

I came across this some time back but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, and I can't reproduce it. Something to do with scripting IIRC. After you click 'upload' it should drop you back into the window and show the attached file:



Your in-line pics are obviously working fine, though. What browser are you using?

 

Nice print. I suspect PLA will show signs of heat failure as that’s a pretty warm spot. ABS may be best.

Great job. Love seeing functional prints.

 

John,
What size is the zip file?

I can mimic the behaviour you're experiencing (using Firefox) by attempting to attach a large zip. It appears to upload correctly, but fails silently to do so.
Oddly, I can happily load an image >6Mb

 

Sorry Michaelh, I was out to dinner for a while. Yes it is Firefox I typically use on a mac. I do have safari that I can switch to, for uploading if you think that will fix the problem. I should probably give it a try just to see anyway. It's been a while, but I remember in the distant past I was on a few forum's that did not play nice with this setup for doing various things, I'm sure it was the software they were based on, not the actual issue of the forums themselves. I want to say it was a phpbb setup, but I'm not sure. Usually it was more of a refresh issue, or opening multiple tabs, but I could see this messing with it as well.

 

For some reason it doesn't work from safari either. I'm not sure what the deal is. The compressed file size is tiny, only 111kb. So that is not it.

This should at least work. It is a google drive link to the file. https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Qs...ew?usp=sharing I believe anyone should have access to it now.

 

I agree. I have a roll of black petg that I may give a go with next, possibly with a bit of silver spray paint on it. But the PLA spool in silver was already loaded in the machine, so I just went for it. I've never gotten my setting perfectly dialed in for ABS, and tend to get a bit of curling on the edges, but for a part this small, I should be OK.

While printing nick nacks can be fun. The engineer in me loves being able to fix problems with functional prints. And I also like an excuse to play around in Fusion360, since I don't actually have to design for a job anymore.

 

Petg is pretty easy to print while abs requires an enclosure to prevent that curling/warping. There are high temp plas I’ve never played with but heard good things about.

I wish i was was better with CAD, I generally use Tinkercad :/

 

This is really cool stuff!

Now if we could only get cheaper replacements for the trim rings...

 

FWIW - back when I had my X350 I had BBS Monaco wheels and I was able to buy just those screw caps from the Jag dealer at a reasonable low price. I bet they still sell them since the caps were common to a lot of BBS wheels. I no longer have the part number but the dealer had no problems finding it.