Paul Busby

With the specific parts I mentioned, unless you can get them printed in Nylon, it's a waste of time.... but designing something like an arm or a bulkhead model isn't a 5 minute task. You can copy the stock one, but that's optomised for injection mould, not printing. It likely wont work well and will require a lot of time and effort to tweak it to work. Unless your mate wants to redesign a part for free, which is something I would discourage, you're better off buying the part as design time, plastic, electricity.... it's not cheaper to print.

PLA, ABS, PETG will all be far too brittle for RC bashing use if it's used on core parts it will break on the first outing in most cases. Some kinds of TPU can work out pretty well, but it's a flexible material so does come with it's own problems.

There are some parts that you can get away with using 3D printer for, for sure, but given that a car is made up of hundreds of parts, I don't have exhaustive list of dos and donts 😁

The general principle is that 3D printing is great for customizing and modifying, not great for stock replacement.

Great response, thanks. I'll leave it well alone in that case!

Yeah I mean, I wouldnt say that... you just have to treat it for what it is.e.g. If you want a custom protector for the top of the shock towers... 3d printing works great.

Have a look around online and see what people use 3D printing for in RC. Some people have made RC cars entirely out of printed parts, but you will see a lot of people using it for customisation and modding.

I print parts out of Nylon all the time. I actually just got some new super stron carbon filled nylon and reckon I can get real close to stock strength for parts, but it took me a lot of practice and experience to learn it, and you can't print this stuff on any old printer.