3D Printed Stick Shift Handle

3D printed gear shifter

Here’s a silly hack for you guys. Turn your head (or anything else really) into a stick shift handle!

All jokes about vanity aside, [Haqnmaq] has outlined an excellent Instructable on how to take 3D scans, manipulate them, and make them 3D printer ready. He’s chosen to use a Microsoft Kinect (one of the cheapest 3D scanners around) combined with some low-cost 3D software. He’s used both Skanect and Reconstructme with great success, which both have free (albeit slightly limited) versions. The model he used for his stick shift was actually taken at the 3D Printing Experience in Chicago.

Anyway, once you’ve gotten your 3D scan turned into a .STL file, it just needs to be imported into Netfabb Basic to make any repairs necessary before 3D printing. Find out what size nut your stick shift uses, add a cut extrude into your model (he used Autodesk’s 123D design software to do this), print it off, glue the nut in, and your done!

Regardless of whether or not you want your head shifting the gears, its an excellent introduction to 3D scanning to 3D printing.

20 thoughts on “3D Printed Stick Shift Handle

  1. Generally “stick shift” implies a manual transmission. Picture depicts an automatic. What you’ve shown here is generally referred to as a “Gear Selector Knob” or “Gear Selector Handle” since it operates an automatic transmission.

    For a manual transmission, the equivalent part would be referred to as a “Shift Knob”.

    Otherwise, a good tutorial for taking and preparing 3D scans…

    1. Yeah, I couldn’t think of what it would be called on an automatic transmission, so I went with “stick shift”. It’s easy to understand what I was referring to, and this can also work on a manual transmission as well. Though “shift knob” would have been a better term.

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