WHAT do you do when a part on your motorcycle breaks, and the manufacturer doesn’t make it anymore?
Settle for an overpriced, substandard and poorly-fitting part you find in the depths of the web?
Accept defeat and go without? (Who needs two wing mirrors anyway?)
Or do you take to a 3D printer to design and print your own part – all within the space of two hours? That’s quicker than Amazon’s Same Day delivery…
That’s exactly what one Florida teen did when the choke lever on his motorbike snapped off. And he’s been using the homemade part for 2 years now.
Posting on Hackaday.io, which dubs itself the ‘world’s largest collaborative hardware development community’, user Jonathan wrote:
‘New parts for my motorcycle are not made anymore, and used are getting harder to find.
‘The choke lever broke off and I needed a replacement, designing and printing one took only an hour or two.
‘I placed the broken pieces on a scanner along with a card for dimensions, scaled and made a sketch off of it in fusion 360, the rest of the dimensions I got with calipers.
‘I printed extremely rough with a large nozzle at 0.3 layer height in PLA as a prototype, but it has been on my bike for 2 years and still works.’
Bravo, Jonathan, bravo.
Images copyright: Hackaday.io
