So, a team asked me to print a bunch of these sprockets for prototyping, they are going in the mail tomorrow to send out to the team.
How much do you charge to 3D print stuff like that? I’m sure Aiken’s FTC teams would be interested in this since they are short on these exact same sprockets.
Well, I didn’t charge anything this time since I had some spare time and the plastic isn’t too pricey, I think all of that is probably less than $5 in ABS.
The catch is that these sprockets aren’t perfect, there’s a little bit of warping on some of them and I never really got around to minimizing it. I also don’t suggest these for competition use, they might break a lot sooner than the metal ones. I’ve got some nylon filament I might give it a print tonight…
Whatcha need?
Very cool - thanks for posting! This would be a fun thing to play with, particularly since one could print sprockets with different bores and hole patterns and numbers of teeth. If the team sends you any feedback on whether they hold up well or not, I’d be really curious to know what they say.
I’d be concerned about the metal chain on the ABS wearing down… I’ll likely end up printing some vex gears and doing wear testing to see how those hold up. If anyone wants to run these tests for me let me know, I’ll print out some gears and mail them out. I’ll talk to a local VRC team tonight.
Probably won’t do those in nylon though since I don’t have a lot of that (just a sample to test printing with) and I don’t want to order new material until late December. (I already have 4kg of ABS sitting around, I need 2 KG or PLA and 1 KG each of Nylon and “wood”)
Thanks again, Andrew!
Team 5257 is very grateful for your help 
I printed some Vex gears over the summer (going to try to finish and have one of each gear). The quality is not the best but I’m going to do some experimenting with different printers to see what turns out the best.
I see them as being useful for