There are a huge number of manufacturers building awesome radio-controlled cars these days. However, sometimes you just have to go your own way. That’s what [snamle] did with this awesome 3D-printed RC car—and the results are impressive.
This build didn’t just aim to build something that looked vaguely car-like and whizzed around on the ground. Instead, it was intended to give [snamle] the opporunity to explore the world of vehicle dynamics—learning about weight distribution, suspension geometry, and so many other factors—and how these all feed into the handling of a vehicle. The RC side of things is all pretty straightforward—transmitter, receiver, servos, motors, and a differential were all off-the-shelf. But the chassis design, the steering, and suspension are all bespoke—designed by [snamle] to create a car with good on-road handling and grip.
It’s a small scale testbed, to be sure. Regardless, there’s no better way to learn about how a vehicle works on a real, physical level—you can’t beat building one with your own two hands and figuring out how it works.
It’s true, we see a lot of 3D printed RC cars around these parts. Many are built with an eye to robotics experimentation or simply as a learning exercise. This one stands out for its focus on handling and performance, and of course that nicely-designed suspension system. Video after the break.
The ability to design and print off for testing a series of non-adjustable, say, a-arms that mess with geometry by like 0.5-1 degree increments is rad! Find the best, stick with it and it will never go out of adjustment.
The ability to isolate variables for testing is a great use case for 3-d printing.
Cool project!
yeah all my prototypes have this huge tension of trying to put adjustable geometry, both to figure out what the best shape is, and to accomodate manufacturing variability in the other components. definitely a great case for 3d printing to get repeatable components and to try different dimensions
On Facebook we have a community called Club Race Hero where we share 3D RC Car designs. The cars are very competitive even winning in races against aluminum and carbon fiber cars.
I suspected that video was from Germany. Nobody else on earth would create such an insane road layout. Traffic lights, a round about and a 3 way intersection with turning lanes, all in a 100 ft box.
But it looks awesome for a model car.
Probably, this seems likea kid bike teaching center, I’ve seen them in Germany.
Incredible idea for the consideration that all parts are excessively expensive and basically if you can recreate multiple times of the same exact thing and basically be able to break it or not over and over and figure out what is the best way to get them to their maximum speed and get the dimensions correct to be able to create a car that can be the fastest car in the world and no matter what track or opponents your facing you will never loose.!!!
Oh shoot, you can print things other than guns?
You wouldn’t download a car