Sounds pretty cool. I was just talking with some friends today about how delicate 3D printed figurines are, like the one of my 8" tall bald eagle perched on a stump. It was a gift from a friend out of her mom's extensive collection of eagle figurines who passed recently. She wanted me to have one because I helped her mom with things when she needed it.
I broke down and finally admitted to her that shortly after moving into my new place I accidentally knocked it off the top of one of my HT speakers. But I eventually found all 8 pieces and glued it back together. Most wouldn't even notice it had been broken unless they used a magnifying glass and examined it carefully.
It made me think though, the people that make their own 3D parts like the one you mentioned no doubt must be using much tougher plastics. I know some 3D printers can use composites, but is fairly expensive. So what kind of plastic do you 3D print with, and how does it compare to ABS?
BTW, I can see your pic in my quote of your post if I click on the link, but I can't see it in your post (no active link), and that's with my VPN disabled (just says imgur.com refused to connect).
It's definitely very brittle, but there are better resin's you can use to have more flexibility. I've seen some resins that are $60+ for 1kg, which is too rich for my blood. I usually buy an entire 1kg bottle for about $20 and yeah, if I were to drop any of my miniatures I've printed, they would absolutely shatter; but wargaming miniatures are mostly what I use my printer for and those tend to sit in a display cabinet after I've painted them or be transported in a secure/foam case.
That said, the higher quality stuff is very nice. I bought a printed miniature off Etsy about a year ago and whoever printed it used a good quality resin, as a lot of the thinner details that would be brittle on my prints were very flexible; it was much closer to a proper plastic. There's also the other style of printing with FDM, but I don't have any experience with that; I do believe it tends to be less brittle, but again I think the strength depends on the medium.
As for my parts, I do have some concern that they might break, but worst case, I can always print more. But, the parts that I'm printing are so small and light that I'm not at all worried about breakage; one part I'm even putting screws in and have inserted and removed it many times without it breaking. But I've also been working on my cure times as to not overcure my prints, which again causes them to be more brittle. The battery tray I printed, I seem to have cured it pretty well because the resin is flexible enough that I've had no issue distorting it to get it between the frame rails; I even drilled a hole in it to test screwing it into place without any issue.
Not sure about the images not working.
But, in related news, I did some research this morning and learned things about gears I never knew before. Apparently, my new motor pinion gear and my old transmission spur gear will never mesh correctly because they are at a different pitch (the space between the teeth, basically). So it's no wonder I couldn't seem to get them to mesh properly! But, turns out my original plastic transmission gear (I used an aftermarket metal one initially here) is the correct pitch, so I should be able to to put that in my transmission and get it to mesh without an issue. Down the line, I can either buy a new pinion and spur or get a pinion puller to pull the old pinion off my
other aftermarket motor that matches the metal spur and get everything to mate correctly. That said, apparently the pitch on the aftermarket stuff isn't quite as good for crawling, so maybe I'll just get something new. Hopefully in my testing and fiddling I didn't strip out the teeth in my gears, but we'll see when I next have time to yank the motor and transmission out and take it apart.
At any rate, it was fun to learn something I had zero idea about yesterday.
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