Tour de France – RepRap to Bicycle

Strange étappe?

Well, here a historic pic from September 2009: at right Erik de Bruin and Bart Bakker with a first RepRap at Protospace.

For that we had to silicon mold and cast the first connection pieces from Adrian Bowyers drawings at the fablab. Then we could print those pieces for a next Rap: add some tubes and rods and there we went. But it proved hard to get a RepRap square.

 

[Erik de Bruin is one of the founders of Ultimaker and drives a TESLA now.
Bart Bakker takes care of fablab.nl and drives an EVEO bike].

 

Now 6 years later suppose you want to 3D print a bicycle. Instead of welding you could use 3D printed lugs (connection parts) and rods/tubes. Like with the RepRap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was done recently by Stephan Schürmann / ColorFabb. The parts were printed on an Ultimaker with XT-CF20 carbon-fiber plastic filament. See the bike and its open source cad-files on Youmagine.