So the rest of my open RC F1 car is printed and it was time to get onto the most tricky part the tyres. The rest of the car was printed in PLA but the Tyres need to be flexible so they are printed in TPU.
The TPU brand I purchased was Enotepad. It arrived in a box that looked plain apart from a logo that reminded me of good old word art. The filament felt flexible to touch so it was a good sign it was not PLA.
You can find my print settings at the end of the post.
My first print went horribly wrong because I forgot to adjust some of the settings. I still had retraction enabled and was printing a little too fast.
The second print was better but the layers were not sticking to each other and gaps were forming. On this print I disabled retraction and slowed down the print speed.
Third time luck I got the settings right. Again I slowed down the print speed to 20mm/s and set the extrusion rate to 115%. With these changes I got a great looking tyre that took just over 4 hours to print. Only another 12 hours of printing to go before I can test the car!
A side by side comparison of the different attempts.
A short video of the successful tyre.
Here’s what I used to print the TPU tyre
Printer: Ender 3 Pro
Software: Cura
Filament: Enotepad black TPU.
Print Settings:
Layer height: 0.2
Wall Thickness 0.8
Top layers : 3
Bottom layers: 3
Infill: 25%
Infill pattern: triangles
Printing Temperature 215 degrees
Build plate temp: 50 degrees
Flow: 115%
Initial Flow: 115%
Print speed: 25 mm/s
You can find most of the files I generated and used on my printer here https://github.com/kenjara/f1-3dp-project
The gcode for this tyre is CE3_Tire_V2.gcode and the Cura project file for the tyre is CE3_Tire_V2.3mf. There is also a TPU material and print profile in there but some small adjustments may have been made since I created those.
The Open RC project guide by Daniel Noree https://danielnoree.com/the-openrc-f1-build-guide/
Shane's Shed 