Reply To: 3Dprinting

[fountain]

My son has done this. He had an old JohnsonRude with a throttle lever plate that was broken in half. He stuck the pieces together with glue, scanned the plate, printed it in PLA. PLA and some other plastics will burn away; he attached wax sprues to the print, invested all, burned out plastic and wax, and cast a new aluminum plate. It wasn’t perfect but was usable.

As a practical matter, this is not cost-effective if you’re looking to market whatever you reproduce. To do a small production run, you would want to make a master of the object, and cast multiples in greensand, the old cope-and-drag method.

Which begs the question: out of all of the years of all makes and models of outboards, what parts are consistently broken often enough to make going to that effort worthwhile?