If you can buy something off the shelf, there’s a good chance that someone has tried to 3D print their own version. [Daniel Norée] did just that with skateboard trucks, whipping up a design of his own.
The main body of the trucks is 3D-printed, as is the hanger. A 195 mm M8 threaded rod is then used through the center of the trucks in order to provide an axle for fitting the wheels and bearings themselves. He 3D-printed the parts using a carbon-fiber reinforced nylon with the slicer set up to maximize strength. In testing, they rolled around the neighbourhood just fine.
[Mayer Makes] found the design online, and 3D printed some using his own transparent high-impact resin, making a cool set of clear-ish trucks. It’s a tough material, which we’ve featured on this site before.
Those trucks ended up in the hands of [Braille Skateboarding], who put them through their paces. The trucks are loose, but take a good beating around the park. Eventually one of the trucks succumbs after landing many kickfilps and ollies on the concrete.
Other great skate hacks include casting your own wheels in a 3D-printed mold. Video after the break.
3d printers are amazing.
They can make things that are literally unmachinable.
They can also make low quality, bog standard, readily available things at greater cost then simply buying off the shelf.
As an actual engineer, I’ve learned to never custom anything that I can buy ready to go and debugged. Helps to have plenty of interesting new work to do.
Everything is finite, including your time. Spend it wisely. Get away from ‘artsandcraftsaday’.
Taking my own advice. Shouldn’t have come back after the twine wrapped tire table.
“They can also make low quality, bog standard, readily available things at greater cost then simply buying off the shelf.”
Ha, well said. Sometimes people wanna try things just to see if they can, but that only goes so far. I would not want the suspension of any vehicle to be made of resin myself, but that’s just me.
> Everything is finite, including your time. Spend it wisely. Get away from ‘artsandcraftsaday’.
> Taking my own advice. Shouldn’t have come back after the twine wrapped tire table.
lmao but what if I have already been visiting this website daily for over ten years just to skim articles
With the present state of things, fuel being too expensive, cars becoming too expensive, public transportation being too expensive or unavailable – and commercial couriers being too lazy to actually deliver to your door despite being paid for it – it starts to become cost and time effective to 3D print regular stuff.
You have to ask, “3-5 business days with 20% chance that the package never gets delivered and you have to go fetch it yourself anyways, or 14 hours in print?
The last mile problem has become worse with the introduction of the parcel machines, which allow the courier companies and the post office to reduce the number of staffed branch offices. Even when you pay for a delivery to your door, many times they simply don’t show up, claiming that the packet could not be delivered and instead drop it to a random parcel machine within the same city. The last 10 times I’ve ordered anything online, they all ended up in different places. The bigger the box, the further away it goes because it doesn’t physically fit the little parcel slots.
Well, don´t bother and get it delivered directly to the machine, retrieve it any time you want.
Same when you have anything to send: print the label, stick on the package, put it in the machine.
With several sizes for the parcel slots, if can accommodate 95% of the items I send, anything bigger is send by freight.
You can choose your default parcel machine for all your parcels, so ?
>You can choose your default parcel machine for all your parcels, so ?
Sometimes, but often not. Depends on the sender and which company and service they take, plus if the machine does not have enough large slots it gets redirected to a different machine that does. Usually they’re already full, or the packet is the wrong shape (e.g. too long) so you get bounced further and further back towards the distribution center.
Believe me, there are three or four different machines within 1 mile radius from where I live, two of them just a couple hundred yards from my house, but I cannot for the life of me get the postal service or couriers to actually deliver there. It has happened only once since they were introduced.
>don´t bother and get it delivered directly to the machine
When I order it to be delivered to my door, I do so for the explicit reason that I don’t want to carry it home – yet the bigger and heavier the item, the more likely it is to end up ever further away.
A reasonable rule of thumb for me is that if a part would take less than an hour or so to design (or find and download), then I should design and print it. It’s $2 gas, an hour of time (driving, finding and selecting, and waiting in line), a 0.00000015 chance of death on the road, and much less fun if I go to Lowes. And if I design it, then maybe someone else will use my design, in which case I will save them a similar amount. And I may end up re-using the design on a later occasion, with further time savings.
But I wouldn’t 3D print something as important to safety as skateboard trucks.
When I think I can get something non trivial done in ‘less than an hour or so’ I smack myself as a reminder of how the last ten of those worked out.
Yeah, but if they purchased the pieces then Mayer Makes couldn’t advertise their Engineering Resin, which is exactly what this is doing.
This project is fun though. I would totally risk my health to ride these haha
“They can make things that are literally unmachinable.”
A large amount of things I see called that, could be knocked out in a couple hours with a bandsaw and a drill press. Not that there aren’t things you really can’t machine, but the term has been bandied about so often in support of additive manufacturing for projects that are little more than “hello world” complexity, that it’s gotten meaningless.
I’d say one of the premier advantages, is that you don’t have to devote 25% of your available area to racking a bunch of different sizes of sheet and bar stock so you can make anything on demand.
The rub on the time/efficiency thing comes where you’ve got say an expensive camera or equipment in the megabuck range, and because of that, the stupid little bracket which they sell for a common problem, mounting it to X or X to it, is priced 10,000% above a generic hardware store bracket, that seems comparable in size, material and forming operations, but nevertheless does not fit, because captive customer cash cow reasons. So you opt to print something up, because screw anyone who thinks like that (And didn’t think of just designing the custom thing to use a generic thing and made two custom things). Or of course you can get the hardware store bracket and uglify it until it works.
This nylon one is cool. I’d like to see long term use vs common aluminum trucks.
I liked the last 3D printed set of trucks that Braille showed off. Autodesk paid for it – they weight-optimized and metal 3d printed 1 aluminum set and 1 titanium set. Super light Ti trucks are begging for a carbon deck. I wonder if lightweight wheels are a thing yet
I should’ve read more – they don’t hold up like aluminum.
Wow, i was never been heard by such these modifications for the skateboard trucks. You have mesmerized us by giving such knowledge. Now, I’m curios and impatiently waiting for these trucks to buy and install on small and light wheels with the street skateboard deck. So, I could perform my passion on these trucks
Hey Lewin Day!
As a skate enthusiast and 3D printing hobbyist, I was really intrigued by this project. It’s cool to see how 3D printing technology can be applied to skateboard trucks. However, I do have some concerns about their durability and performance compared to traditional metal trucks, especially for hardcore skateboarding. Nevertheless, it’s awesome to see people experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the skateboarding world. Keep shredding! 🛹