Using 3D Printers To Build A Car Out Of Carbon Fiber | Part 1 | The Legacy

Welcome back to the Legacy EV240Z build. Today we are building the fenders. Okay so how did we get here? We're already a third of the way there. These fenders slash headlight bucket sections are actually seven separate prints. It's like 200 some hours of printing. Dang. But having four printers it makes it really nice we can just cruise through. So you know split up between all four of these printers. I think it was maybe four days in total. And not even all of those printers were used the entire time. So it's very nice having multiple nozzles printing at a time. But we will show you now how we glued this up before we get to any other stuff. Look at that. Look at that. Damn he just roasted you on camera that's crazy. We got prints. So this is the driver's fender cut up into six pieces. Will here sliced it. What Perusa? Best price. So we printed them and they were full boxes. As you can see behind you there's a whole pile of right here. There's a whole pile. Those are all the backs of these. So we cut them as kind of in vase mode I guess. I don't know. We're new to 3D printing. We don't really know. It's working so that's all that matters. We did bump the nozzle up from a 0.4 that was on before to a 0.6. I don't know what we did with the layer height or anything like that. I just let Will do it. So yeah that's good. Yeah so we had an issue with this print but no problem we just glued in a little piece of I don't remember what plastic this is. It's another type of plastic. I'm not sure but we epoxy that in already to get it all ready but basically what we're going to be doing is running some epoxy on all these seams throwing some clamps behind here and then at the end of this we'll have a full fender ready to go. Well it's the top section of the fender. These fenders are kind of two pieces. This is crazy. I know dude isn't it? Dude I figured out it's the big glue gun corporations. They're trying to hustle me. Look how dude this is a crazy nozzle. You definitely get hustled. We got half the ******* tube in the nozzle. I know. What did we do this last time? We started with... We did two at a time. We did this one, this one, this one, this one, that one, that one and then we glued the doubles together. Start with an easy boy. You ready X? I'm done. That's what you want to call them? I like it a lot. Yeah I don't really like it but it's about half the price of VP420 and it should be just as strong so VP420 smells weird too. This one's got a big gap in the middle. Good. Maybe you can just put one on the regular. I wish we had footage of him breaking it. Me breaking it? You knocked it off. Gravity did it. Oh dude they already bent it. It's back like a turtle. I like turtles. All right that one's glued up. Yeah we'll probably let it sit for the rest of the day. Maybe until tomorrow but Will's grabbing our one that we did yesterday. It's a fender. The hood's on on so. Damn we got a lot. Having two even sides is so helpful and then also like all the details in the vents that's going to be that would be so hard to shape by hand and then get both even. Get every vent even with itself. We're still going to do some body work on this but a tight skim of top coat and this thing's probably fine. All these things lined up real well. Just have to grind down some of the epoxy that seeped through there but yeah excited. So we're gonna go ahead and print more stuff and glue more stuff. Check back in. All right welcome back. So you saw us glue this all together. We had a flimsy 3D printed fender. We cracked it a couple times. I had to re-glue it but it's fine. So what we did was we sliced the back edge of the fender off and then we just bonded this plastic fender onto the metal fender. So we used the DP420 bro stuff. Threw a bunch of sheet metal screws into it. Pulled out the screws. Made sure it was all prepped and ready to go and then Will and I spent a good three days probably combined mudding up. Hey we spent a good bit of time mudding up these fenders. They're about 99% of the way there. I'm gonna do a quick little couple small things over there. One or two things over here and we're gonna get ready to get these bad boys ready for primer and then that comes into the mold section and we'll explain that when we get there. Good old danger hammer. He is dangerous. So we actually did some of the mud work on this on my wife's car so then we moved it over here and we actually had a little crack here but I got a slight low spot. File down that crack a little bit. Fill two little bits and then we also need to do a little mud work on the nose here and pull out all of these bolts that are holding the fenders on right now and then smooth that so when we make the mold we can get all of this in the mold and not you know have a big bolt head where the hole is supposed to be. So I'm gonna go ahead and knock this stuff out and then we'll pick right back up. All right the fenders are both straight now. Straight as they're ever going to be but you can see on that side I put a little body line back in here where the two the headlight bucket and the fender meet. Without that line it's kind of like a lot of bare open area and it's a nice little detail so we're gonna sand it back in. Got a little trick for you on how to do stuff like this. I don't know when you'd ever want to be doing this but I have actually done it a lot including on like the hood of the ford but I got some fine line tape here. Some people use this for like pin striping or doing some sick flames on your uh on your hood. Looks good. I curved I just marked the spots I want them to land and everything in between that we're gonna kind of just make up. Yeah it looks cool. Now let's see if it matches the other side. I can't see from my house. No that looks good. It's going to bump up uh I don't know how what three millimeters four millimeters I don't know what this is. Follow it and then I'm gonna get a piece of 80 grit fold it like a taco sand it in and that's pretty much it. There's a nice little beveled edge it looks like it's two separate pieces. When we lay it up it'll obviously just be one separate piece I mean one single piece but for all intents and purposes. I did run it a little bit of plastic here so it's not very deep not very like right here but on the carbon part I could always sand it in but I also might run by and like put a little tiny black line through here before I clear it so it'll differentiate it a little more so even if we lose it there it's okay you'll see the divot here but that's good we'll go to priming. Can't keep anything clean in here. Vendors have been here for a whole day and they're already dusty so you're gonna hear me say this a lot but since we learned about uh well since fiberglass came out with their stabilized carbon fiber the 3k we've now been using on everything we possibly can. Since we're doing a v-weave herringbone kind of style weave all the way down the center of the car we need you know a nice 45 direction weave on this fender and then the opposite on that side but to get that you need to the carbon fiber only comes off the roll one way and it's 50 inches one direction so you need to the max length we can put in a piece is then 50 inches. So we ran into an issue with our fender being much longer than 50 inches so what we did was we cut a little seam here and laid in a piece of stabilized carbon right here cut it around here put a little seam a slice here you can't even really tell where the two pieces kind of overlap each other either made a template out of tape pulled it up and then we did the same thing for the back here because even here to here was longer than 50 inches there's a little seam here it's a little more visible but this isn't like some multi-million dollar crazy build with like a huge staff of people it's literally me and will over here building this entire car so i'm happy with this there isn't a little seam mark you can see here but i think it looks cool looks race ready i feel like i haven't seen something like that yeah yeah we didn't technically have to do it actually on this side we had to do on the driver's side but we just did it on both sides so it's even it's not just like a seam on one side and not on the other side we did keep our little groove here so they look like two separate panels like that we drilled some of the holes already for the hardware but it's only kind of half in there we had a bunch of broken hardware we didn't even take out the guy that owned it before us i guess kind of just full blast just ripped out a bunch of bolts that's right now too but whatever we'll drill and tap them or we can cut the bolts off the nuts off from the back of all new ones on that i am super happy with our first set of carbon parts that came out of these molds we also have the air dam down here which we have not really shown much you did see it in the back of the hood episode we were making the mold for the air dam and then we actually had to add a little piece of uh add a little piece of metal here so this will sit over top of this will be a removable battery lid for the front batteries but i need to go underneath here so you know there's not a bunch of air flapping this up probably throw a couple really shallow bolts through there and then there is going to be a little shelf inside the fender that's going to stiffen this corner up and then this will actually mount slightly farther back like that and then this will all get cut out just a little bit back behind this edge and then our led light will sit back here with a little polycarbonate lens right here probably just cut that out use a little heat gun heat form it a little epoxy in the corner black out the back of the lens glued in there permanently not have it be removable the light will be removable from the back and we'll do some like carbon ducting so you don't see down you wouldn't really see anything anyways but you know yeah i'm super super happy with this obviously all this stuff needs to be blocked with 180 and then uh satin cleared but we will probably satin clear a bunch of stuff closer to the end of getting all the body panels fitted so this section from the headlight bucket all the way back is just a regular piece of 3k there's just slight wobble and the weave around the vents and stuff like that we could have maybe gotten away with the stabilized and had a bunch of cuts but it would have taken so much time to get an exact perfect piece of stabilize we are just kind of running through we only have a couple weeks till sima and we need to make it so we've been talking about a sima car for i don't even know five years probably and this is the closest we've ever gotten so we're gonna keep pushing as hard as we possibly can we'll make it we also have like a slight airfoil shape carbon tube this is going to go inside here back behind here if you can imagine there will be a inside fender piece right here that rolls in you can see on the render xavier put a picture of the render here with a nice couple yeah so the fender piece will sit here and then this will get cut trimmed perfectly it'll get bonded to uh the inside of the fender and then it'll bolt to the stock-ish fender piece and then we will eventually put a little rear view camera on this and it will poke out and look out to like this direction and that'll be our side view mirror and then we'll have three screens up towards like the where the rear view mirror would typically be we'll make a nice carbon panel that sits around the tube for the cage and all that stuff but that's going to take some time so that's going to be an after sema project so we'll have no mirrors for sema but it won't actually have any mirrors after sema but it will have a little camera so we will be able to see but not a necessity we got to make it so name of the game yeah it's not to get there but all in for a first layup out of a really complex mold our first 3d printed plug i'm super happy cool well that's all we got for today next episode more carbon stuff who knows