3D Printed Scooter Zips Around

Tooling around downtown on a personal electric vehicle is a lot of fun, but it is even better when you do like [James Dietz] and ride on your own 3D-printed electric scooter. As one of the entries for the Hackaday Prize, RepRaTS (Replicable Rapid prototyper Transportation System) has a goal of doing for scooters what the original RepRap project did for 3D printing: provide a user-friendly design base that you can extend, modify, and maintain. It doesn’t even require power tools to build, other than, of course, your 3D printer.

The design uses threaded rods and special plastic spacers made to hold a large load. The prototype is deliberately oversized with large hub motors, with the understanding that most builds will probably be smaller. As you can see in the video below, the scooter seems to go pretty fast and handles well.

[James] warns that the scooter is not yet safe to use. There are a number of battery mounting and safety issues that need to be repaired. We’re looking forward to seeing the final versions.

The 3D printed parts are all in PETG with 0.8mm nozzle and 0.4 mm layer height. The infill is a rather modest 30% grid and no supports are needed. Tensioning the threaded rod is critical and there are specific instructions about both the torquing and gluing steps required.

8 thoughts on “3D Printed Scooter Zips Around

  1. Electric scooters were a stupid idea in the 90s (but back then it was just a very niche toy for rich kids) and they are still a stupid idea nowdays. My wife works as nurse in city hospital. She says the amount of (sometimes very serious) neck injuries increased almost tenfold since public scooters were introduced in 2017 and helmets are a little help here. Little wonder. A regular 26-inch bicycle will have little trouble dealing with bumps, kerbs and uneven road surface. It’s also possible to perform emergency brake without falling over. Most bike crashes end with cyclist landing on his side. There are some scratches, maybe painful but not really serious injuries. Scooters on the other hand have their small wheels and stupidly unstable kinematic design in general. Because of that crashes will inevitably end with rider landing face-first on the concrete. Why people ride them is beyond me.

    1. To avoid exercise and keep the hard earned waste line?

      Purchased a bike recently. The chap in the shop asked if I was interested in an electric. To which I pointed out my tum. If I can’t dodge the pies, I’d better not try to dodge the occasional bit of anti-pie. Even if it’s on the way to the shop to get more pie…

    2. – Because many people live in flats and apartments and have absolutely no storage area for bikes.
      – Because you can fold them and take them to tram or bus when it starts raining.
      – Because you can push them through grocery store whereas bike you have to lock outside and even if you use several kg massing steel chain and lock, it absolutely will get stolen after few weeks you doing that.

    3. Some years ago, one of my invention was posted on this website. I worked hard on this project and was very happy to see the article on Hackaday.

      But in the comments, everything was focused on something other, a little detail which was not about the technology, the work or improvements… To be honest, I was desappointed by this mentality. And now, I can see in some cases nothing changed :s

      1. one statement that speaks for itself is “My wife works as nurse… She says the amount of (sometimes very serious) neck injuries increased almost tenfold” Anecdotal evidence obviously. Nurses generally don’t study public health in any depth and are in no position to make blanket guesstimates of statistical phenomena. Especially in the US where we can’t rely on nationwide standardized government health databases for stats like that. God bless nurses for their roles, but too many health workers I know imagine they have great insights. And, actually, in matters like systemic corruption, they probably do. But there’s also a vocal minority of nurses who are anti-vaxxers, and another group which are die-hard COVID vaccine fans, which gives me a lot of doubt as to relying on what any single nurse has to say about nearly anything.
        Should anyone on a public forum commenting, “well my partner who is a … says…” really be taken seriously? It’s the nature of social media and perhaps it’s fortunate that Hackaday has such a crappy interface that many give up trying to comment on this ugly spaghetti-code platform anyways.

      2. Haha, I get that. My non tech comment/joke about pies, was more to diffuse the negativity of the first while not knocking the important point made about safety. These things do propell people to face plants, but first comment being negative felt wrong…

        Electric things that zoom about are fun. Once made a really fast and not very safe electric bike. Exciting, but heavy as that was lead acid battery days.

        Would love to have a go on this. It does look like a really fun project, but there are lots of other ways of making a frame that are within reach of most makers. Many predating 3D printing and much stronger. So however much fun it looks, it also appears a technological dead end. Carefully sculpted plywood plywood (using a CNC??) and topped/reinforced with a bit of fibreglass would be ever so much stronger and quicker as well as possible to make without a CNC or a 3D printer. While a few non structural 3D printed parts are almost essential in any maker project now. In my pie fuelled opinion at least. Though I must confess, tonight was paella not pie.

        Can’t resist in pointing out that commenting that people should add on topic comments, while not doing so themselves is brilliant. Leaves a void needing to be filled. So here’s the main ingredients of some [wood] fillers:

        Boiled linseed oil and calcium carbonate.

        It would make a terrible pie filling.

    4. Because every technology starts as more expensive, more impractical and more dangerous alternative than the incumbent solution and it takes early adopters, and investment before it becomes potentially the next incumbent technology. People with that attitude would complain why we experiment with toxic medicine when prayer was the obvious and practical solution.

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