What a mouthful that title, eh?

My good friend Bryce, a very talented DP and maker, has a beautiful 80 Series Toyota Landcruiser that he or may not be obsessed with…

He bought a weld-it-yourself bumper swing-out kit for that rig. He didn’t know how to weld yet, so I had him back that beauty up, into my overgrown LA driveway; where we hacked up his bumpers and stick-welded straight to his frame.

He asked me to teach him how to weld, I told him I’d teach him what I know about welding…And while better friends would have let him MIG weld it, I made him stick weld it. Straight to the frame. And he crushed it.

The swingout turned out great, and survived many, many on road and off-road miles. But earlier this month, he decided to run the cruiser in its birthday suit. No roof rack, no siwngout.

Since we welded the swingout spindle straight to the frame, he couldn’t remove that. Even if the spindle wasn’t welded to the frame, he would just have a massive hole cut in his driver-side rear bumper.

The spindle isn’t unsightly without the swingout, quite the opposite, I think it looks cool. But Bryce wanted something to prevent it from rusting while he’s running it bare. Since grease, a ziplock bag and a zip-tie isn’t his style, we talked about a 3D printed spindle cover since I’m consistently trying to improve my CAD skills.

I took some measurements with a thread pitch gauge and a pair of calipers. The threads on the spindle turned out to be 1” x 14 tpi. Pretty Odd.

My cad software didn’t have a 14tpi thread pitch for 1″ diameter–it only had 12 and 10 tpi–so I had to customize a thread profile and apply it to the model.

Other than the thread pitch, modeling was pretty straight forward. Using measurements from the spindle to create it as a part, and build off that with offsets. Again, I’m just in the beginning of learning CAD but really enjoying it .

Exporting was simple, just outputting an STL that I could import into Cura, my slicer.

In Cura, I used a .24mm Layer height with an initial layer height of .28mm with 20% gyroid infill. 

I printed this on one of my Ender 3 Pros. I printed at 260º with a 60º bed temp with black Overture PETG. I have a clone Micro-Swiss all-metal hot-end and was using a .6mm hardened steel nozzle. Capricorn bowden tube, and Creality’s all metal extruder (the red dual gear one, not the new silver version). 

I had rented some gear to Bryce for a shoot earlier in the week, and his brother Brady was kind enough to drop off. I figured Brady would see his brother sooner than I would. So I sent him with the spindle cover prototype telling him verbatim, “this wont fit, so don’t get his hopes up. I just need to hear what needs to be modified.” The very next day I was sent a picture of it on the spindle, fitting perfectly.

Success! If you want to follow Bryce’s build, Duke, check out his instagram or his forum thread on ih8mud.com

Thanks for stopping by.