Fusion 360 Pinion Wind-up Car by Stevenjsmithsr

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

I was looking for a project to help me learn Fusion 360. I'm just a beginner and wanted to make something for my grandkids. One of them is in love with cars. I printed him one of the kit cars and his father I think flipped one of the gears and it didn't work. So I saw gzumwalt YouTube Channel who had been designing and making windup gear cars for awhile and decided to give it a try. Below are the links to the to his YouTube videos of him making the design in Fusion 360. I started the project on my old computer and soon found that it just wasn't going to hack it. (10 year old i5 windows computer upgraded from Windows 7)
So I decided to upgrade and that worked. It took a couple of tries to follow his video. He has his models posted on another model sharing site. His design is real nice with the floating pinion gear. It allows the gear to be engaged while the spring has energy and drops off once done to allow the car to coast. This also has a very important advantage with small kids who can't be bothered to wind the car up and just like to hold it and push it back and forth over the floor (like my grandson does, when I saw his fathers video of him using the kit car I sent him)
gzumwalt does some things that maybe works for him but give Fusion 360 fits if you follow them. One is deleting the reference parts. Fusion 360 has a lot of features to include built in model generators that you use for the spring and gears. They are then added to parts list so you can copy their profile to the new part you are making. Deleting these references as he does will likely crash the model and slow the computer way down.
Once I was done, I now had the model in Fusion 360 so that I could change the design. I didn't like the solid wheels and added spokes to them. I also made the front support bar a bit larger and added a SVG to it to add a car manufactures logo to it (Toyota and a Hyundai). I added there STL files if you like them.
Once printed, I found out that the spring (2mm think spring) he use in his design was a bit strong for the car. (the back wheels will spin out and not move the car), So when I printed the second car I made a thinner spring (1.5mm thick). This one works pretty good and I include a video of it going.
The design uses 8 rubber o-ring gasket on the wheels to give it some grip. You can use either a 223 O-Ring (1 5/8 - 1 7/8 1/8 section) or a 47mm - 54mm 3.5mm section.
Hope all goes well in your printing.
PS I also included the Fusion 360 file for those who want to change it ever more.
How I Designed a 3D Printed Windup Car Using Autodesk Fusion 360https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAgUQOUJbvU
How I Designed a 3D Printed Windup Car Using Autodesk Fusion 360, Spring Motor.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io9Wry74p8g
How I Designed a 3D Printed Windup Car Using Autodesk Fusion 360, Gear Trainhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-2HIeeEkP4
How I Designed a 3D Printed Windup Car Using Autodesk Fusion 360, Chassis.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0e-XgTPnS8
Windup Floating Pinion Car, Axles and Wheelshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS41pWYm3Rs