New Zealander Ivan Sentch must be a big Bond fan as he’s undertaken a spectacular project to 3D print a life-size replica of James Bond’s 1961 Aston Martin DB4.
To be clear, he’s not actually 3D printing the car itself, but rather a mold from which he will produce fiberglass body sections. These will be mounted on his not-so-exciting 1993 Nissan Skyline and fitted with a custom interior to complete the replica.
The most astonishing part of this project is that he’s printing all the mold pieces on his Solidoodle 3D printer, an inexpensive desktop unit. He must produce over 3,000 separate pieces to complete all the required molds – and then sand them smooth for molding. So far, he’s produced about 75% of the required items, each part taking around 6-7 hours to print.
We’ve discussed 3D printed cars previously, but they have been prohibitively expensive to produce as they’ve used expensive commercial 3D printing gear for custom parts. The Solidoodle approach will be far less expensive. Even so, Sentch has already spent NZ$2000 on ABS plastic, which you can imagine is a massive amount of plastic.
The project will take months of 3D printing to complete, let alone the assembly of the car itself. We’re looking forward to seeing the result.
Via Stuff.NZ
