I've had a go printing some plastic parts on a friend's Ultimaker 3D printer. He had some spare PLA plastic so I made some number plate brackets to replace the embarassing folded aluminium things I made years ago that are so bad I'm not putting a photo up of them.
I've also got the use of a heat staking machine, which honestly you dont need a special machine, you could just use a soldering iron and a steady hand, so I can put some threaded inserts in the plastic.
Heres the heat staker:
Inserts and finished items:
I also had a play around making an upper column shroud, as mine is (like lots of things on the car) a bent piece of aluminium. I took some measurements and made a surface in CAD, then printed a test piece 1.5mm thick to trial fit and work out where the fixing holes, hazard switch hole and indicator stalk hole need to be. The lower half of my column is the Sierra plastic part. The difficulty with the upper part is that the column boss is round but the rear of the shroud at the dashboard has a flat top, and my dash is at a different angle to the back of the boss, so lots of different angles and curves going on. Will keep updated as I develop it and home in on the final printed piece. The whole thing will be covered over with fabric like my old one was. Also lined up finally is a replacement for the sierra stalk.
