A little Taco Tuesday rapid prototyping - Pro grille insert

This might fall flat but I'll give it a shot.

I've seen a few cool grill inserts while browsing around and figured between my CAD knowledge (albeit 2D, not so much 3D design) and my 3D printer, I could figure something out to make my own.

As any lazy person does, I started online to see if anyone had modeled anything so I wouldn't have to start from scratch.

No dice.

Then I started looking for pictures of things like Raptor lights but between the lack of detail and no dimensions, that didn't help very much, either.

So I broke out the paper Diet Mt. Dew box and pencil, headed out to the garage and traced it. Which, in hindsight, was SO much simpler than trying to be lazy. Bonus, once it was scanned, it was scaled at 100%.



Tossing it into AutoCAD and 10 minutes later it was being exported to the 3D printer software. Fifteen minutes after that:





Ever so slightly small but that's easy enough to remedy. Now to move on to how deep to make it, clips, deciding on what to actually print on it, etc...

I'm kind of leaning towards the simple yellow/orange/red diagonals to break up all the black on my truck without being too much. Once the base design is finished, it would be a breeze to modify it to use the old Toyota logo, TRD, witin reason, just about anything. Just about.

Back to designing!

 

Interesting. keep on posting!!

 

Interesting...

 

Make one of these and mount your camera in it. My idea . Good or bad.

 

Use a raptor light as a sample. It has clips and snaps in

 

1) I don't have one
2) The pictures online, while a decent guide for the direction I need to go, don't really help.

I'm getting there, though.

 

What's the endgame exactly?

 

Already tried this, the smallest (decent) camera I could find was this one. It's too big still, you need a 23.5mm diameter hole and the grill openings are 15.7mm.

 

Partly to see if I can, partly to make something to put on my truck. I've printed a bunch of stuff and done some minor modifying but I've never really had a need to design something from scratch that has to be accurate or it won't work.

I just checked those sizes against what I have set up so far and while I'm just a tick larger than your 15.7mm, much more than that and the side walls will be very thin and weak.

Doing a quick look for cameras and I see what you mean. There's one that is right on the edge of fitting but the lack of reviews would definetely have me shying away from it.

- - - - -

Version 2 done:



Things learned, changes to be made. for V3: Narrow it up (part of the grill has a taper to it) and extend the clips. But that'll have to wait for tomorrow.

 

Yeah, the 15.7mm was the measurement of the raptor light I had. So yes, like you said, the actual opening is probably just a little larger.

 

Might I suggest making the tabs beefier or adding support to the back of them. I think with hot and cold a design like this may become loose after a while.

 

Since I already broke one off trying to heavy hand it, that was absolutely on my list!

 

I mean, does it serve a purpose? Just cosmetic? What's the why?

 

Cosmetic, at least to start with. Where it might go from there I don't know.

 

I could see it being good for blocking up the grille in the severe cold.

 

I literally just had that same thought in the shower!

 

Looks great!