Engines

Our avid online followers remember the stellar work that Korneel Bullens does on his Ultimakers. Not only has he one of the busiest 3DHubs in the Netherlands (with excellent reviews to booth), he also finds time to print some side projects. Back in 2015 he printed the Toyota Engine for us with colorFabb_XT (check it here working on our ancient Vine account).

As if that was not enough he took on the next challenge like a trooper and printed the Saturn V rocket with our all-round filament nGen:

The Saturn V rocket as showcased on the Amsterdam AM Show. Original post here.

A while ago Korneel approached us with the idea to print not one, but two engines: The Subaru Boxer Engine and the Chevy Camaro LS3 V8. The results are simply awesome:

Subaru engine. Original design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1643878

Chevy engine. Original design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1911808

Like the Toyota engine, these two engines were designed and modeled by the insanely talented Eric Harrell, aka ericthepoolboy on Thingiverse. You can find Eric’s website here. His design talent, combined with Korneel’s printing skills resulted in a fully functional Subaru engine:

Korneel has 5 Ultimaker 3 printers and he used four of them to complete this project. Estimated printing time was about 200 hours per engine and assembling the prints took about 40 hours each in total. All parts were printed with a 0.15mm layer height.

The Chevy engine, opened up. One of the great features of these prints is that they can be disassembled with great ease due to magnets being used to hold several parts together.

The material he used was PLA Economy, which may be Korneel’s favorite filament at the moment. He receives a lot of requests for PLA prints and uses our PLA Economy due to its ease of printing on his Ultimakers.

PLA Economy works great with basic PLA settings on a wide range of printers. We see a lot of demand for this filament and it has been a favorite of our users ever since launching it in November last year.

Some close ups of the Subaru engine:

PLA Economy offers a great value for your money. One spool consists of 2.2kg of filament for a dirt cheap price of a little over € 35 (ex VAT and shipping). It is a different grade than our range of PLA/PHA, but we guarantee the same colorFabb quality. Our filaments are readily available from our webshop.

Here are some print settings to get started:

Adviced 3d printing temperature
195C-220C

Adviced 3d print speed
40 – 100 mm/s

Advised Heated bed (if you have one, not strictly necessary)
50-60C

Cooling fan
100% fan cooling for best aesthetics, this gives best performance on overhangs and small details. For best mechanical performance try printing with the least amount of cooling needed, for optimal layer adhesion.

Or: You can use the standard PLA settings if your printer has these pre-defined and these should work fine.

Close up of the Chevy engine

You can also opt for the PLA Economy Value Pack: order four spools as a value pack and receive an immediate 10% discount!

Buy PLA Economy                                      Buy PLA Economy Value Pack

PLA Economy is very well suited for the maker who needs high quality filament at an affordable price. It is a perfect filament for large volume and small series production, made with the guaranteed colorFabb quality that we are known for.

Once again it has been great to see Korneel’s work again (and we quietly wonder what he will come up with next…) Visit his site and contact him if you need a print job to be done!