Designing in photoshop is aweful.

Bill of Materials

1. 3D Printer
2. Black & White PLA/PETG
3. Hairdryer
4. Heat-shrinking clear puches

Finished product

Planning phase

There wasn't much planning. As you can see from the finished product. The print area could have been a bit larger. But anyway, I'm happy with the end result, and so is my brother - because it was his birthday present.

CAD

Originally I wanted to create a few selected Pokemon, but I realized very quickly that organic shapes are not my strength and I only saw one way to successfully complete my project - Unown.

Packaging

I printed a total of 120 Unown. 60 models and 60 TGC-ish cards. This meant that I had to print, cut out, glue, heatshrink and pack 60 packages.

Im pretty happy with the end result, despite the small blemishes.

Finally replacing the removable bikelight and mounting a real light. + Update from "Bike Carrier v2"

Bill of Materials

1. 1,5mm² Speakercable
2. USB 2.0 port for soldering on breadboard
3. breadboard
4. shrinking tube
5. male and female wire connectors
6. soldering iron

Finished product

As it´s the unwritten law of the internet to show the finished product first, here it is:

Planning phase

The whole idea about this project is to use my bike battery to power the lights. I wrote the FISCHER support a long time ago with the inquiry if the sell lights that are compatible with my bike. Unfortunately they don´t.
As I have an USB port on my bikes controller, my plan was to buy some lights which intended use was receiving current from a dynamo. The problem with that? Bike dynamos generate 6V @ 3 watt. And my USB port generates 5V @ 1 amp. I got my bench powersupply and hooked up the lights with 5V @ 1 amp - and they worked!

Manufacturing

With this new knowledge, my plan was to chop up an old USB cable, clip the data cables and use the two remaining wires.

But the wires were way too thin to solder them, so I built my own USB cable with breadboard, 1.5mm² speaker cable an USB port and a soldering iron. Which worked on the first try.

As I have a 3D printer, a housing for the connector had to be made.
Not shown here: I filled in all the cavities with hot glue to protect the electronics from the weather.

Now that the difficult part was done, all that had to be done was printing the remaining mounts and wire everything to the bike.

Update from Bike Carrier v2

After almost 2000 km there a no visible damages or deformation on the 3D printed PETG parts.

Manufacturing my own dice

Just showing off

Text from top to bottom on each dice:

• Volume
• Melting point
• Name of material
• Weight
• Density

Modifying my newly added carrier for my E-Bike

Problem

1. Bike carrier wont fit with newly bought mudguards

Finished product

3D printed PETG adapter for my mudguard.

A few weeks ago I built a new carrier - which didn't really work. It would have worked if I hadn't decided to add mudguards to my bike. The mudguards didn't really fit on my 29" wheel and 6" tire, so I had to mount them in a way which deviated from the manual. Front wheel got the zip tie treatment and the back wheel mounting points had to be modified.
As a result my self built carrier mount had to be removed.

The OEM mudguard mounting was just a piece of straight plastic. But for my use case it had to be angled 90°. After 4 revisions on the 3D printer it finally fit. The black marks on the prototype are areas which had to be modified between each iteration.

The carrier mount was a whole different problem. As a test I printed a mount from PETG which only held for 200km on my bike. Because the overall design worked quite well, I decided that im going to rebuild it from 6061 T3 aluminium, which I had laying around.

Sadly I cant tell you about the longevity of the parts, because I had to RMA the controller. Maybe I'll remember to write an update once the replacement parts arrive.

Adding a carrier to my new E-Bike

Bill of Materials

1. Bike Carrier
2. 1m of aluminium tube (outer Ø10mm, inner Ø8mm)
3. Block of aluminium

Finished product

It does look okay, if you are standing far away. But for your trained "metal-worker-eye" it is hideous. But im treating it as an early prototype, meaning i´ll drive it for a couple of weeks and will adapt the new design to its current flaws. Let´s get to the build process.

Build process

I had the raw stock material laying around in my workshop. The carrier was bought from a local bike shop. It is an Cube ACID 29". One could ask: "why not use the included mounting option?". Easy answer: Because it does not fit with my 61mm (2.6") wide tyres.

Planning phase

The idea is as always: KISS.
Fortunately the aluminium tube had the exact diameter as the bought carrier, so no work had to be done there. Except cutting it to length.

Manufacturing

The stock had to be squared and brought to dimensions. After that they need to be drilled three times for all the mounting points.

Because one part should yield two finished parts, I had to saw them apart. (No pictures, because the manual sawing sucks).
Fit check looked good, but there was one unaccounted problem.

The aluminium tube did end way too high for the forward facing mounting points.

So I had to manufacture an angled adapter, which did fail horrible. As you can see on the last picture I used a drill bit as a spacer. It worked wondeful for the first part, and failed spectacular on the second part. (No pictures because I threw a small rage fit). I was not in the mood to mill the parts again, because they took way too long on my small hobby mill, and they were way too over engineered.

New plan: make the parts simpler.

Pro:

• can manufacture parts way faster.

Contra:

• aluminum bar is bent a little bit in final mounting position

Because I dont have a lathe I had to mount my tool in the vice, and my part in the spindle. Dont judge me. It worked.

Assemble time.
For a prototype it looks good, but im not happy with it. Im waiting for my mudguards to see how they fit my my carrier. Maybe I have to rethink the whole mounting options. But thats a problem for another time.

Last step was painting, which did not work really well. It was windy and I wanted to finish the project. Thats why I rushed the paint job.Its a prototype.

Finished assembly: