1966 Chevy Bus

This is a gift I made for my grandfather; a 3D print/Rapid Prototype of his 1966 Bus we would go camping in every summer. Its actually a SLA – StereoLithography print, I don’t recall the material they used, but it ended up being translucent.

I also made an Instructable that has a little more information about creating the bus.

Pictures Above:

From Top Left –
Photo Reference
Render of ‘air tight’ or ‘water tight’ STL model
3D print as received from Forecast 3D
3D print with clear windows masked, white base sprayed and white masked off ready for blue paint.
Blue paint sprayed.
All masking off, details painted, cleared.

The final model printed out at approximately 12″ long. The mirrors and blinkers on the front had attachment points that were just to thin and didn’t work out. I had tried to account for this before sending it off to be printed, but had originally planned for a model about 19″ long. That was the largest build size of the first printer I had talked to, but ended up being too much money. So, I had to scale it down. The interior of the model was quickly hollowed out, this saved on build time and made the model have a lot smaller volume. I could have done a much better job on hollowing it out, it was just a quick extrude from the middle, and pushed inward. Nose of model and tires are solid.

If I did it again I would have probably built the model in pieces and assembled the entire thing at the end, more like a scale model. I didn’t know that you could actually glue this material easily. I found this out when they told me they had problems with the hitch, ladder, and racks on the top. Those parts were actually rebuilt and attached again by the printers. Also, if I had setup some of the parts to print separately I could have had the rack built horizontally instead of vertically and it wouldn’t have needed any of the support structures they had to use to build it (see picture below)

 

I’ve done some 3D Prints before, but this time I wanted to try some different modeling techniques. The bus is a single mesh STL file( 341,804 triangles.) I modeled the large shapes first, then the smaller details, in separate parts which were welded together. Not a single mesh that got sub divided. Many parts were along large flat surfaces so I would cut in the more detailed parts into a single quad or other polygon. The mesh is REALLY REALLY messy but it works for the print, and I was running out of time for Christmas.

You can see some the aspects of the model I really pushed out more, in hopes of getting a better print. I knew it wouldn’t be able to hold all the detail (license plate for example) but I wanted to try. The “WARD” text on the rear end actually came out very nice on the final model. Many of the really small chamfers and rounded corners I had ended up being unnecessary at this scale though…

 

 

Images above show the global illumination renders and wireframes.