Force

Hmm, the turbo plumbing looks a bit weird. If you have a air to air intercooler in front of the radiator as you have plumbed you should loose the cross over pipe from the turbo to the intake manifold that goes over the front head, because you don't have both as that cross over pipe is the route from the compressor side of the turbo over to the intake manifold on a non air to air intercooled engine like this Cat 3406 engine originally is, it doesn't even have a water to air aftercooler that most of the higher horse power 3406 engines had.

I can agree with you in some of your reasoning Steve. The 3D printing is mostly better than the injection molded stuff when it comes to small details and lots of 3D prints are really very good, but I see the resin casters on the aftermarket will suffer of this a lot more than the model companies will and that's sad in my opinion because they do fill a void. So 3D printing will most likely kill the resin businesses long before they will ever touch the model companies. I find it hard to believe that 3D printing will be cheaper than injection molding when it comes to complete kits, one of the largest 3D priniting companies Shapeways who had state of the art machines went bankrupt recently...so I'm not so sure if I believe it ever will. The design stage in a CAD program takes the same time for 3D printed part as it does for a part in a tool for injection molding so that's a fact, and time is not free if you are going to earn any money, and therefore the designs will not be free either, so printing out a detailed part will allways cost money if you count everything in, just look at what the 3D printed stuff costs today where a 3D printed individual part costs 1-10 bucks and a complete engine almost costs like an injection molded kit, not far from it anyway. I don't think 3D printing will be much cheaper and faster in a forseeable future but it's for sure a good source for our hobby, and if you can do everything yourself, both the CAD design and the printing, it's a win as it only costs time and material...and of course the computer, the CAD program and 3D printer but that's a one time cost.

Very nice.

It's a thing I have noticed on pictures of real W900's, none that I have seen has the front wheel in the center of the wheel arch, they are allways slightly forward of the center line, so it's how they were made. But of course you are right, a custom truck is a custom truck and you can do what you want with it...like fix the off center position of the front wheels. 🙂

Yes you are right there, 3D printing has done much for the hobby so far and will probably do more in the future as nothing is impossible with this technique. But for real mass production it has a long way to go yet. But I wish I could use a CAD program and have a 3D printer myself...I have lots and lots of ideas on things I want to do.

Yes it's not the internal combustion engine that's wrong, it's the fuel it runs on. Sustainable fuel can come from many places, not just from agricultural sources, it will come but it just takes time to do it economically viable.

You blow us away Brian.

Like your build. You know the front wheels on a real W900 is off center do you? Most if not all w900's I have seen the front wheels are slightly towards the front in the wheel arch.

Some of the old pre-80's Revell Top Fuel dragster and Funny Car kits had the Crower 8 port injection

I use CA glue very sparingly on few parts, far away from paint, glass or chrome. Parts like metal to plastic , strengthening some joints and such. Mostly I use liquid glue like Tamiya Extra Thin Cement, Tenax 7R, or Revel Contacta Professional with the thin metal tube.

Got mine here in Sweden Wednesday last week.

Well I don't see that happening any time soon, by the time that 3D machine print out 30-40 kits the injection mold machine has produced hundreds. So I don't belive the 3D print will make injection molding obsolete in a forseeable future.

There has been much talk lately about returning to 3 litre V10 engines on sustainable fuel and skip the hybrid systems and even maybe as soon as 2026, pretty much like WRC has done for this year, I don't belive it's possible in such short time as much work has been done for the 2026 cars allready, but we'll see. It's the complex hybrid systems that are expensive to develop and get to work, not the combustion engines themselves as most manufacturers has that covered.

Ford is doing their engine in conjunction with Red Bull Power Train who today does the Honda engines Red Bull and Racing Bulls use, so Ford doesn't start with a blank sheet of paper as RBPT is building engines allready. And yes, Cadillac will be the 11th team, so they did not buy their way in like Audi did, but Audi will do their own power unit, they have been at it wor some time now...but the engine regulations have to be quite firm for some time before it's viable to put in the money. If the go away from the hybrid power units they use today the engine will be chaper to develop because all the hybrid technology and battery packs are very expensive, that's why they will skip the MGU-H because it's very complex and very expensive, and that was kind of a demand when Audi was to enter as an engine manufacturer.

Well Steve, I'm not so sure 3D printing will replace injection molding and make it obsolete any time soon. To develop and draw up a kit in a CAD program takes the same time if you will do an injection molded kit or a 3D printed kit so the difference is the tool cutting time for the injection mold, but I'm sure you will get out a larger production capacity from that than the 3D printing will ever do, not from one machine. When you are doing the volumes the injection molded kits are done in there isn't even a competition, the molding process in an injection molding machine takes a few seconds per shot and you mold every part for the kit in the same tool at the same time and get out thousands and thousands of copys a day. So for small scale production 3D printing is fine but not for larger productions where it needs capacity to do large volumes in a short time. If we go to model kit production, once the tool is cut and done they can do the whole years planned production for a kit in a day or two in one machine, change tools to do another kit, and then another and so on.