Hello, Great work! About the kits?

[Oldwolf]

What a fantastic idea!

Hello I am Oldwolf on the Star Citizen verse and James Balderson in the real world,

My wife and I both enjoy tinkering with various materials. With the current prices of 3D printers we won't be getting one anytime soon. Will the kit plans be set up so we can use different materials and hand craft the parts?

Thanks for taking time to read my post,

Oldwolf
James
"Make your own luck"

[jeruw]

What materials are you comfortable working with? What tools do you have available?

I didn't have access to a 3d printer either, but I did have access to a small CNC machine. I was able to take measurements from the 3d part files and re-draw most of the parts in Inkscape, allowing me to then cut those parts out on the CNC using aluminum. You could probably also get away with acrylic or plywood, though I don't know how durable those parts would be. Take a look at my build thread for some more info. I've uploaded my inkscape files both there and to GitHub.

[Oldwolf]

We can get our hands on a metal lathe I think at my wife's former work place where she has good ties and good friends. It is a university bus maintenance shop and there are some simple fabrication tools there. As far as wood goes I can get what we need. What about places that can "print" the parts for us if we bring the plans, or is there no such place?

Which brings me too this question, what materials would you suggest? I am as unfamiliar with the 3D printing tech as one can be.

[jeruw]

You could get lucky with the 3d printing, it really depends on your area. A few people have been able to go to their public library or university library and get the parts printed only for material cost - around $8. Unfortunately, 3d printing is time intensive. The plans say to expect it to take 10 hours to print all the parts. As such, any place doing this as a business is going to charge you a lot more. Even though there's little hands-on time expense, there's the availability of the machine to take into account. I got a quote from a local UPS store for $300, and they didn't have all the parts accounted for or the correct quality settings taken into account. Around the same cost as purchasing through one of the online 3d print shops like Shapeways.

There's also 3dhubs.com as an option. This aggregates local folks offering 3d printing services. Prices vary quite a bit, but might be a reasonable option.

A lathe isn't going to help much. A CNC mill of some kind would allow you to create the parts from aluminum. If you're good at woodworking you could attempt creating the parts in wood. You'd probably want to review my designs as a basis. A laser cutter or cnc router would make the job easy, otherwise it'll be a bit of work. You'll probably want to use a piece of aluminum as the pivot shaft rather than a dowel, but that's just a guess.

Other than all that, I'd suggest waiting a bit to hear about zdayton's plans. He's currently doing a complete redesign with the idea of doing crowd funding to produce a injected molded version of the throttle.

[Oldwolf]

Injection Molding is my hope then. All things considered I think it best to wait and buy the whole thing in a kit or maybe if all goes well for him a finished product through crowd funding. Thanks for the info you have been very helpful and patient with this old man.