Posted to News on 23rd Nov 2015, 17:51
3D printing makes production of one-off part feasible
KW Special Projects (KWSP) and sister company KW Motorsport (KWM) have used the latest 3D printing technology to recreate a vital missing component from an historic French sports car.
When faced with only a faded black and white photograph of a missing gear selector housing, engineers from KWSP used their AM (additive manufacturing) capabilities and high-performance engineering experience to design and manufacture the missing parts.
The vehicle in question, a 1927 Amilcar C6, employed an extended gear selector housing, which had been adapted from the original car. The reasons for this original adaptation are unclear, but it was possibly to make driving more comfortable.
Kieron Salter, managing director of KWSP, comments: "This was a unique project that demanded not only technical know-how of the latest AM techniques, but also creativity and intuition. Using AM instead of conventional manufacturing methods, our engineers were able to design and make parts quickly and cost-effectively using 3D printing technology. This approach enabled us to fit a printed prototype into the actual vehicle to ensure it met with the design brief, fitted perfectly into the cockpit and also gained the owner's approval.
"Using Solidworks CAD software, we converted the scan data into useful CAD files that gave us the mechanical interfaces and geometry to begin designing the new cover. Because the original castings were manufactured from handmade patterns, there are not many exact features within the cover that can be predicted.
"Also, the new ergonomic position of the gearshift via the remote linkage was not easy to predict, so we not only had to reverse-engineer the casing, but also its installation in the car and the hard objects such as the dash, bulkhead and steering wheel in order to get the positioning correct."
This approach, using a mixture of CAD design, 3D printing and traditional aluminium casting of the final part, would previously have been costly to deliver using conventional methods, and risky and expensive to prototype. But using state-of-the-art techniques, creating the replacement gear selector housing was feasible.
Follow the link for more information about the services available from KWSP.
