pic: 6Wheel Drive Sheet Metal

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by MattC9

Our team is very lucky to have an industrial strength 3d printer coming in during this moth sometime, so hopefully we could 3d print some gears for this drive, because the gears we found were almost perfect but would cost us something like 250$ per gear, so if any one has a place to get Large gears at a decent price, please PM me or put it in the comments!!

Do you know the make/model of the 3D printer you are getting?

While 3D printing literally anything you can CAD is awesome, it has its limitations. And one of those limitations is that with currently available technology 3D printed gears are unlikely to survive for very long in a torque-transmitting application in a FRC robot drive train*. And depending on what model of 3D printer and what material you are printing with, it may actually be more expensive to print plastic gears that large than it would be to purchase COTS metal gears. Some high-strength 3D printed parts cost several dollars per gram in raw material and support.


* However, 3D printed parts work great for making gears/couplers for encoders and potentiometers.