Can’t Find a Part? 3D Printing Can Help

Maintaining a classic car is getting harder to do as original parts become more scarce and the cost of making new parts has skyrocketed.

No one knows that better than Jay Leno, whose garage contains hundreds of cars and motorcycles, a few of them more than a century old. To solve the part problem, Leno has become a proponent of 3D printing (also called additive manufacturing), which the comedian and retired talk show host uses to print his own replacement parts and casting patterns. Leno has not only bought 3D printers for his garage, but regularly turns to outside providers like 3D Systems or Quickparts for more complicated jobs.

You may have seen some desktop 3D printers before – they can take a CAD file or other design and print a 3D object layer by layer. Consumer printers are okay for printing plastic toys or jewelry, but there are industrial models available for printing everything from ABS plastic to titanium.

As a solution for the rapidly declining stock of original and reasonably priced reproduction parts, this type of on-demand manufacturing can save time and money. When it comes to plastic parts, a 3D printer can pretty quickly churn out switches, gaskets, clips and other parts. Those brittle plastic grilles on muscle cars from the 1970s seem like a good candidate, too.

In addition to printing parts from plastic, 3D printers can also be used to create new dies or molds for metal parts that can be made using investment casting, at a fraction of the cost.

Restoration shops or customizers with some engineering know-how can even tinker around with an original CAD file and make the part better/sturdier/more functional. Don’t have a CAD file? You can use a 3D scanner on an original part and use that to create a copy.

For items like plastic trim or rubber gaskets that wear out or become fragile over time, 3D printing may become the go-to strategy for replacement. Why hunt down another original rubber boot for a wiring connection, when the replacement is likely to be in almost as bad a shape as the one you want to replace?

You can even make custom accessories. Want a snap-on coffee cup holder for your ’66 Mustang? You can print that.

If you don’t have the cash available to buy your own printers (not really a problem for Jay Leno), or you just need a few parts for one car, there are service bureaus who can help you 3D print just about anything. A few of them are targeting the classic car market specifically.

Restorer Jeremy Weinman used 3D printing to customize a 1966 Ford F100. He created CAD drawings for a custom dash panel, tail light housings, and a steering column collar and then printed them out of heat-resistant plastic using fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers available from a service bureau called RapidPSI.

Wisconsin-based restoration shop Motion Products has formed a 3D printing subsidiary called Fused Innovation. Need to replace a brittle plastic windshield washer fluid bottle on an old car? They can scan the original and print a new one that exactly matches not just the general design of the part, but the specific part that was originally on that vehicle – right down to all the dents, warts and scratches.

Fused Innovation is using a variety of different 3D printers for making solid parts, casting molds, solid metal components, and parts generated via stereolithography. (Investing in the technology was a no-brainer for the company, since they specialize in high-end Ferrari restorations.)

Georgia-based PartWorks can create reproduction or custom parts using CNC machining, 3D printing, or injection modeling (or any combination of those processes), and provides in-house 3D scanning and reverse engineering services.

Freshmade 3D in Youngstown, Ohio, provides a similar service, and has teamed up with Pennsylvania-based restoration company Hahn-Vorbach to make new parts for classic cars.

There’s enough of a market for these printed reproduction parts that the OEMs are starting to get in on the act.  Porsche Classic, the automaker’s division for classic vehicle owners, is leading the the way by offering a handful of 3D-printed parts.

Currently, the company provides around 52,000 different spare parts for owners of older models. For parts no longer in production, the company would even go as far as create brand new tooling to manufacture the parts in small batches. That’s an expensive proposition, even for Porsche– tooling and part dyes can cost tens of thousands of dollars to recreate, a hefty price tag to make a few hundred (or even a few dozen) parts. And that cost gets passed right down to the vehicle owners.

Additive manufacturing turns those economics on their head. Right now, Porsche Classic is manufacturing just under a dozen different parts (steel and plastic) using 3D printing, but more are on the way.

Porsche, in fact, is almost a perfect fit for the type of high-cost/low-demand economics of 3D printing. Take, for example, the Porsche 959, a super sports car the company stopped making in 1988. There were only 292 of these vehicles produced – in 2017 a 959 sold for more than $2 million at auction. Needless to say, if you’ve got one, you probably won’t mind laying out some cash to get a repair part.

Porsche Classic was able to use 3D printing to produce a cast iron release lever for the 959’s clutch, which passed the company’s stringent tomographic exam and evaluation in a test vehicle. That means anyone with a Porsche 959 can continue to show off the car’s top speed of around 200mph without having to worry about finding parts when the clutch goes out. (Note: If you are driving your $2 million classic car that fast, your clutch might be the least of your worries.)

3D printing can even help recreate some of the most difficult to find items. 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys also helped a collector restore a 1930 Sampson Special, an obscure stock car that was equipped with twin 8-cylinder engines.

Collector Joe McPherson bought the scrapped, engineless car in 2001 hoping to restore it to its original condition, down the most minute detail – including the brass serial number tag on the radiator. The original tag was stamped out using a steel die, but MacPherson’s restoration team didn’t want to spend the money to build a new $1,500 die to just make one tag.

Working with Stratasys, the company was able to print a new PolyJet die in two days, embossed the tag and welded it to the radiator.

Expect to see a lot more applications like that as the printers get better, costs go down, and more printing materials come to market. Eventually, restorers will be able to have a part printed faster than finding a replacement. For customizers, 3D printers open up all kinds of new possibilities.

And if you eventually get tired of making replacement parts for that old car, you’ll eventually be able to print a whole new vehicle.