TubeNet

Very cool.....

https://youtu.be/pdFsgvNmyvU" target="_blank

Yeah, cool. All he needs is a lathe now to smooth out the rough printed parts, or a $10k printer and material that's $x00/pound. Brass is cheaper than good printing plastic. But if he has brass and a lathe, he can just make a real one.

Low cost plastic printing is just what you think of when you hear "low cost plastic printing". It's a lightweight paper weight. I love the disassembled toy NCC1701 Enterprise in the back ground. That kind of puts it all in perspective. It's fun, but it's kind of useless.

It is great to experiment with to see if it doable and works before buying an expensive part, in this case a rotor, from overseas...

Right. 3D printing a rotor is an expensive way to gather as little useful information as possible.

If you look at how the light reflects from the "scoops" you can see that they are cylindrical, as if they were drilled out instead of scooped. As a result the air passage is severely constricted. You want to be able to roll a marble through that passage, and the marble should be almost as big as the valve bore. The marble would have to be about half as big to get through the prototype rotor in the video. But it's still a worthy project. Plastic may or may not be the best material for a rotor, but at least it won't corrode like the aluminum rotors found in the plastic tubas that are now on the market.