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Derby Wheels

If you remember Milwaukee’s last Nerdy Derby, we tried to supply lots of pieces for people to build cars with. I ended up laser cutting a bunch of wheels, as well as 3D printing some wheels… take a look at the junk car post from last year.

Well this year I started printing wheels, and then decided that plain old boring wheels just wouldn’t do, so here I present a progression of wheels I’ve designed so far. I’ve only printed about 1/4 of them, but I’ll probably give them all a try before the big Nerdy Derby event at Milwaukee MakerFest on October 19th, 2013.

wheel001
The plain old boring wheel from last year.

wheel002
Speed holes… should use less material, but may not actually print any faster.

wheel003
Indent, for no particular reason.

wheek004
More speed holes, this time done using a proper for loop.

wheel005
Reverse spokes?

wheel006
Howdy partners! It’s a wagon wheel!

wheel007
And a steering wheel!

wheel008
And an Aperture wheel?

wheel009
Wheel wheel wheel wheel wheel…

wheel010
Tri-force wheel?

wheel011
Weird wheel?

wheel012
Starting to do some hull action for more 3D-ish wheels.

I will say this, I am no expert at designing wheels, but it’s been a lot of fun and a great design challenge, and I really do enjoy tinkering with OpenSCAD to create things.

Oh, and then I wanted to do a spiral wheel, and did some searching, and found this great wheel library, so use that if you really just want awesome wheels and don’t care as much about screwing around with code to learn things on your own. (Or, us the Highly-Configurable-Wheel library and learn from it!)