Ok, now that I've finished rebuilding my scooter it is time to work on the naked bike again.
First thing was to work on the saddle. This part was the one that worried me from the very beginning. The saddle is rather small and I can't really add too much material without making the thing ugly. I tried many things on CAD and the bike wouldn't look good with a huge and bulky saddle, it has to stay small, which makes for a big challenge: how to make this both small, comfortable, easy to build and look as professional/high quality as possible?
I decided to experiment with flexible 3D printing filament (TPU). I made a few samples, several tests... and finally came to this one
I haven't made much change to the shape itself (smoothed a few sharp edges, made it a tad wider), but I did try several infills and print thicknesses. The part is mostly hollow with a 3D honeycomb pattern which speads the internal loads equally all over the saddle.
Well, it's a total success.
The saddle feels exactly the same as any other motorbike saddle, can't tell any difference while sitting on it. I made lots of test rides and no problem whatsoever. I can definitely ride the bike for a while without feeling sore!
Super happy with it, this method will be my goto for the final version, I'll just have to cover it with a layer of nice leather.
So yeah, you can totally 3D print a motorbike saddle, turns out it works great. It feels much better than the one I made using silicone, huge win! 8)
So now that I know that the saddle will work, I started working on the carbon fiber battery covers. My plan here is to try to 3D print the mold directly.
So first I 3D modeled the thing, then I bought a big spool of 3D printing filament.
And then I launched the print:
This is the largest part I've printed so far with my machine. It took 40 hours to complete and about 2.5kg of filament. Went smoothly.
....and done! no warping or anything, perfect print.
It's a bit hard to grasp the size of this thing but it is really huge.
Anyway, after that I sanded the thing and applied bondo to make is as smooth as possible in order to hopefully get a good surface finish on the carbon part and help with mold release:
Now I have to protect it with some kind of paint or gelcoat, and it should be ready to build the first carbon cover. What's great about this technique (if it works at all) is that I can make perfectly symetric parts since the molds directly come from my 3D files. Plus it's not too much workload, the only time consuming part is to sand and bondo the whole thing, but I'd have to do this no matter what other method I'd be using anyway.
So hopefully the next step will be to lay up the carbon, but I'll have to buy all the stuff first.