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Your boots turned out great! Nice job. I'm glad you were able to work with my STL file and the boots turned out so well. I always have a concern when I model & print things whether others can replicate them and get the same results I did. .
I'm surprised at the level of interest these have generated. Cool.
While I said earlier I wouldn't commercialize these, I also said if the price of gas continued up I'd reconsider (which it has) so I guess I'll bend a bit. If anyone is interested in a pair, send me a PM. I can fire up the printer and print a couple for a reasonable donation plus shipping. Keep in mind it takes an hour and forty five minutes to print one of these and when you add setup time, volume production is not an option .
Ron - you picked my interest on this and thanks for sending that file a while back. I have my eye on an Ender direct drive printer and see that ninjatek makes an 85a tpu filament, think that would work?
I have a set of original boots as spares, but hate to use them since they are so rare, and am about to pull the trigger on a printer and try to make a usable set. I figure I can make other stuff as well and need to stay current with technology.
Bringing this back to tell Ron and others my thoughts on these. Yesterday I received the boots that Ron was kind enough to make for me. I will NOT be putting them to use on the truck anytime soon as I am still collecting parts. I got these because I have found out with certain parts for these trucks you get them when you can or don't get them at all.
Anyway I opened the package and these look really good. I pushed, pulled, squeezed, and stretched (what I think would be past normal use looking at pictures) these for about an hour each last night while the boss lady and I sat around. NO rips or any type of delamination could be found.
Just my pennies worth of thoughts.
Thank you again Ron for making these up for me.
Jeremy
I thought I'd post what I did to manufacture an ebrake cable boot for my 49 F1 since I was unable to find anyone making an aftermarket one. I decided to try to design one and try to 3D print it.
Not having any old ones to use as a reference, I started by taking dimensions from cable itself and cable holder/clamp to start my design. I also had no idea how long to make it, so I arbitrarily picked 2" long. With the dimensions and a rough idea, I started doing a 3D layout and came up with this...
I ordered a spool of black TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) that was listed as having a shore 95A.hardness. This is a little stiffer than I'd like and is considered semi-rigid but I figured that would have the best chance of feeding in my Ender 3 Pro bowden tube printer. Going with a more flexible filament would require costly printer modifications and I'd rather put the money into truck parts.
It ended up running much better than I expected, and it took a little over an hour to print one. When it finished, I was very pleased to see how flexible it is.
The first one required a little tweaking to fit properly, and the next one fit perfectly.
Well, this is what worked for me and set me up with parts that I wouldn't have been able to obtain any other way. They're not perfect and probably not the same as original but they'll work.
If anyone has any feedback on the correct dimensions for these, send them my way so I can make modifications to get the design closer to the original.
Of course, if anyone has access to a 3D printer and wants to make their own, PM me and I'll be happy to provide the STL file.
3D printing offers a great opportunity to recreate parts for our trucks that are obsolete and no longer manufactured by anyone. Maybe the forum should add STL & Gcode files as allowable forum attachments in addition to the jpg, gif, png etc image files so we can share 3D printable parts?? Maybe start a parts library?
Ron
Great work . E-brake cable boots that were printed here are a tad more flexible . First prototypes were too hard . They are available as of Mon 5-22 .
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