After a ridiculously long, drawn out process of working on the Miata to replace the suspension and bushings, I’m getting to the point of thinking about how to do the alignment of the suspension.
Too many hobby cars… I need to reduce costs and with a decent alignment costing hundreds of dollars, maybe it’s time to get serious about trying to perform suspension alignments myself. This way it’ll be possible to make adjustments between events on the competition cars so real experimenting with settings can be done.
I saw the alignment tools from DIY Fab Shop and downloaded and printed the wheel hub adapter for the Konig Hypergram wheels. My current ‘scrubs’ are on Konig Countergrams so thought these adapters may work… It is very close.
The adapter fits but it is a little sloppier than ideal. The detent length needs to be shortened to get the adapter to fit more precisely.
Finally! A practical use case where I can learn a little bit of FreeCAD!
Wait… What? Every single operation of the workflow/transformations to convert an STL to an editable object brings up constant “FreeCAD is not responding. Quit or Wait” dialogs.
How? This isn’t a state of the art PC nowadays but it’s no slouch either (Intel 11700k, fast 64GB RAM, NVIDIA 4070 Super running Debian Linux).
Installing the offical AppImage from the FreeCAD website instead of using the flatpak didn’t seem to make a difference. Marginally better or is it placebo effect? Some further web searches led to threads that talked about the dialog boxes, even a gsettings command line to set the time out period longer but that didn’t really help. Grrr… This is unusable.
I know, I know! I should recreate the file properly or ask for the source in a different format, etc. But that doesn’t get stuff done at 10PM on a Thursday night in the meantime. To learn enough FreeCAD to recreate the part is more of a time investment than I’m willing to sink into this at the moment — that sounds like a task for “Future Chris”.
Blender?
Import STL, watch a five minute video of how to make a change to an STL file, select the point cloud defining the clip tangs, transform the point cloud downwards about 0.6 mm. The task is done in 15 minutes including the time to get the STL file loaded into the printer and printing. At no point was there anything resembling waiting on the computer to do something. Wow.
I always assumed that FreeCAD was going to be the main tool for creating and editing objects for prototyping and building things but now I’m researching more of the parametric design add-ons for Blender.
I’ll revisit FreeCAD when the correct opportunity presents itself.