New wheel centres for the DHC

Those that follow this blog will remember that well over a year ago, I fitted a set of refurbished Wolfrace Turbo's to my DHC. Because they came with only one wheel centre I decided to have a set of those made. At the time I contacted a few local companies who specialise in 3D printing, but they all were far too expensive or just not interested. So I opted to have them spun from aluminium alloy instead. Sadly the guy who would do the work suffered from a heart attack and as a result he had to stop with work.

So to fill the gap till I found a solution I fitted a set from Compomotive, shown above. But they really are only a stop gap solution as they are a fair bit too small, but so far the gaffer tape bodge has kept them in place. So it was pretty easy to forget that I had to finish this little project ...

Until recently that is, when I was given the details of i.materialise, a company in Belgium who specialise in 3D printing. So the AutoCad file I created over a year ago was dusted off and converted to a 3D printing format. That turned out to be not as easy as I thought, as one of their support engineers pointed me to the fact that the model I sent over was rather rough. But with some help from a friend who knows more about AutoCad then me, the file was converted to a much higher resolution 3D printing file. The end result should look something like this ...

The file is currently waiting in the print queue, with an estimated shipping date of January the 9th 2015. Needless to say I  am very keen to see the end result as this might be an easy and economical way of fabricating certain parts.