3 ms·
6000 and 7000 series aluminimiums are used a lot in road bicycles so that would seem like a natural application outside of heavy industrial/automative applicati
by noir_lord 9y ago
6000 and 7000 series aluminimiums are used a lot in road bicycles so that would seem like a natural application outside of heavy industrial/automative applications.
- aidenn0 9y agoI wonder if there are novel shapes of bicycles that could be enabled by this; a triangle made out of tubes has a good strength-to-weight ratio, but perhaps it could be improved?
- hwillis 9y agoI doubt you could do anything to a bike frame with this that you couldn't with foam-core carbon fiber. The advantage 3d printing over CFRP is cost is constant with intricacy and number of joints. That means its best for skeletonizing to a small scale or lightening really intricate parts, and expensive for large, sweeping parts (like the shape of a frame). So, you could skeletonize things like brake levers/mechanisms to a much higher degree than with older aluminum alloys. The ultimate limit to skeletonizing something is the tensile strength since each member basically becomes a wire eventually. At that point its strength is determined by the tension it can sustain rather than the bending force.