FF-01 Build - Battery Holder Manufacture

As I've already mentioned the FF-01 came minus a couple of bits. I managed to order a body fitting kit from ebay to replace the missing rear body mounts. At the same time I also ordered a manual, probably come in handy for the £2.50 it cost me. This left me needing to sort the battery holder.

After a bit of Googling I realised that I wasn't going to be able to buy one so I would have to make my own!

I measured up the chassis and did some pencil sketches to get some ideas down and then went into my 3D CAD package of choice, Solidworks.

The part was dead simple to draw, although in hindsight I'd have done it slightly different, maybe a mk2 version is needed but more in that later! Here is what I came up with-

The idea was to get the part made up on our ABS rapid prototyping machine. For this I needed to create a wireframe vector model known as an STL. A couple of clicks later and this was done-

Feeding this into the Insight software that drives the rapid prototyping machine takes this wireframe model and breaks it down into 0.2mm layers (the thickness that the ABS plastic comes out at) and also works out the paths needed to be taken by the machine to lay down both the ABS model material and the support material that is removed after the build is complete.

The part took around 50 minutes to build. After it was removed from the machine it looked like this with the support material in place-

The part was quite robust and the support material quite easy to get to so I attacked it with a screwdriver rather than dissolving the support material away.

Time for a test fit!

Like a glove ;) All I need to do now is drill a hole in the centre shaft so I can get a body pin through. I could have added the hole to the model but it would have been filled with support material so I decided to just drill it out after.

So, the improvements I mentioned... I should have added a fillet to the join between the horizontal and vertical parts to improve the durability and remove a stress razor. Secondly I think the original had angled supports on one side. I'll see how my chosen battery fits and may do another version with these added.