a quick tip on getting nice and smooth inner diff gears, if you have a soldering iron with a thin tip (a variable temp iron even better) do quick short strokes with the tip in each gear tooth for a very strong smooth finish,
i have a set of diff gears that almost turn like metal ones now…
the smoothest and what feels to be the strongest yet!!!
(BTW these are printed with line trimmer cord, i have found it to be just as strong as the taulmans 618 but with much less flex so it holds up for the diff gear much much better than anything else i have tried)
Nice, good call Cain. Will definitely have to try, I was actually going to try using a razor to clean mine up but this way it will help seal and bond the layers together even better. Nice work
Fair warning: This will thoroughly ruin iron tips. The oxide layers made by the plastic take ages to sand off. You’re looking at a good hour of work to get an iron that’s been used on printed parts to tin nicely again.
you should never sand a soldering iron tip, you’ll remove the plating, and it will corrode from the solder, and your wrong, i had and have had zero problems with plastic and an iron, the burnt plastic just wipes off on the sponge.
update: the gears seem MUCH stronger, they just lasted a run with the motor with no throttle limit and lots of hard turns (to the point i rolled a tyre off the rim and flipped the car lol) i’ll be doing this to all the inner gears from now on
to thread it into what?? i dont know what the big deal is, i have been using an iron to weld plastic for years and never had a problem with it, i have never tried it with PLA though, that might be a different story.
its just that i’ve never seen an iron that the tip is threaded, but you could even heat a thin nail with a candle or the flame on you stove etc if you dont want to use a soldering iron.
Odd, I have never seen any that didn’t have threaded tips. But, all I have had were cheap Radio Shack ones. I haven’t soldered much since I was in highschool. I didn’t have money for replacement tips. My dad had a grinder and a die set so I made them.
all the ones i have seen ether have a sleeve that goes over the whole shaft of the tron and grips the tip via a raised ring on the tip (weller irons) and the cheap iron im using at the moment has a similar idea but just has a small ring on the tip instead of an entire sleeve (DOSS) and even the cheap ones i have seen normally have a set screw in the side to hold the tip, so one of those ones you could just pop a nail into the iron and tighten the set screw.
