In this video, some person demonstrates a working 3d printed Brushless motor. It’s a pretty impressive video to watch, he sends the thing flying and claims it can handle 500W of power.
I am envisioning a direct drive motor that someone can print in a mix of PETG and nylon, similar in build to this guy’s motor, that can simply press fit (and clamp onto if necessary) onto a TB218 hangar, secured by bolting your flywheel onto the axle and into the direct drive teeth on the motor.
I’m willing to throw down $50 for parts to try this out… And if I have enough beer this weekend maybe I’ll have a proof of concept design drawn up by the end of the weekend.
Anyone experienced with making motors, feel free to chime in. What do you guys think? I’d want this to be an open project that we can share the files as a community if this thing works.
The main problem with this is getting the electronic parts like the stator and can/rotor. The easiest was is to buy a diy motor kit from APS but they are only available in 6354 or 5065. The other option is to cut up a ready made motor but that would be hard for users without many tools, which is the best part about 3D printing it.
I have been looking into this for a little while now but always get stuck on where to source the motor part, I’m thinking just hack apart an Sk3 but they are 86mm long so would need longer than normal 180mm trucks 218s are hard to get in Aus.
I am happy to try and help share some little things I’ve ran into while designing this. Although unfortunately I’m not great with cad software as I only recently got a 3D printer
you could do a hallbach array with the magnets so no need for iron behind the magnets and just print the rotor but the stator is going to need iron to build up a magnetic field strong enough to be worthwhile. I bet you could find a burned out stator from many people here but at that point maybe worth it just to use the rest of the motor parts and forget printing…so maybe you could make a stator with iron powder and glue. it would likely be less iron than a typical stator, bad, but would have really low iron losses with the iron powder being so small and no distance for eddy currents to travel, so it would be good for very high speed and not as much torque. If you do winding with some super thick wire that would hold its shape and then pour/press an iron slushy around it and it potentially would be a great motor …if only you can make the best slushy of probably iron and probably epoxy…and then you have no voids in the motor, no wasted space and this is what would make it ideal.
There are also filaments out there with up to 80% iron fill and they are designed to burn out so that you could get a 100% iron part out of the printer. Just throwing this in here, ich have no clue about stator design.
218s are hard to get in Aus.