In reply to Mr_Asa :
Yeah, I worked at O'reilly for something close to 15 years. They're 99% idiots, even if they just had one bigass unit at a DC and shipped out parts from there you could track down at least one person in the region capable of doing the job correctly.
OEMs are in the business of selling new cars. Except for certain circumstances, it's not really in their best interest to make it easier to keep older cars on the road for any longer than legally required.
Mercedes sells a lot of parts for older cars, but you also pay out the nose for them.
iansane said:I'm surprised O'reilly/autozone/advance hasn't tried breaking into this realm. Setup each store with a printer, train the management staff to use it, license NLA parts from manufacturers, profit.
They wouldn't need to have equipment at every store, the chains have a distribution centre in most metro areas and they could serve then stores in the metro area. In less populated regions a large store central to a region could handle the printing.
I think many of you are grossly overestimating the capability of 3D Printers
There's a bunch of reasons why car manufacturers don't make dealerships have 3D printers and all that jazz.
First off, not every plastic part can be 3D printed. The quality and durability of 3D printed parts might not match up to the standards that the manufacturer wants. The materials they use might not hold up as well as the OG part, which could put folks in danger.
Secondly, it's not always cheap for dealerships to go invest in 3D printers and all the gear they need to use them. It could cost a pretty penny, and dealerships might not have the cash to keep them up and running.
Last but not least, manufacturers want to stay in charge of the replacement parts game so they can make sure everything is top-notch. If they forced dealerships to have 3D printers, that could put their products at risk and mess with their intellectual property rights.
In reply to ProDarwin :
Indeed, while 3D printers have evolved significantly in the last 10-years, they are far and away from being machines we can use for genuine small-scale manufacturing. They remain almost exclusively in the realm of fast prototyping. The machines that 3d print car parts are hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of machine. The $350 hobby things printing in PLA or other filament or even the $2500 resin-based 3D printer I have sitting in my lab right now - None of them are capable of building parts that I would want on my car. Even trim pieces, because the material properties of the filament/resin used are either not UV resistant, rigid but brittle, or flexible but not rigid. None of them are the right combination compared to tin/metal or molded plastic for use in a moving, shaking, dynamic, environment.
For prototyping purposes they work great. I can make something, print it, check the fitment, check the math, fine tune it.
If anything the real advantage to the advancement of 3D printers has been the development of open-source type software, decks, and jibs that can be repurposed into desktop-sized CNC machines.
The short answer has some have note is "because it's a lousy business model"
How many people want a glove box hinge for a 2005 Altamry? 50, 20,10?
The demand simply isn't there.
ProDarwin said:I think many of you are grossly overestimating the capability of 3D Printers
And there's a big difference in the capability requirements between some idiot printing parts in their garage for their own use and a major company retailing printed parts to the general public.
Slippery said:I guess my question would be, why did they need to change the design on the sunvisor clip?
Supplier A has a patent or trademark or maybe Supplier B wants to avoid paying royalties and/or has legacy tooling they can use to undercut Supplier A's price and get the contract.
Ian F (Forum Supporter) said:OEMs are in the business of selling new cars. Except for certain circumstances, it's not really in their best interest to make it easier to keep older cars on the road for any longer than legally required.
Mercedes sells a lot of parts for older cars, but you also pay out the nose for them.
OEMs are in the business of selling debt, cars are a useful means to sell debt to people. GMAC is GM's profit source.
On the service side, they are doing a bang up job of charging for access to service information...
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
They sell you the car, they sell you the service information, they sell you the service tools, they sell you the service parts, then they sell your information to third parties for more profit.
Efforts to work around those arrangements will be viewed as existential threats and treated accordingly, as evidenced by their general behavior and opposition towards independent mechanics, anyone running anywhere near IP in terms of brand, lawsuits against aftermarket software providers, etc.
I agree with the folks that are saying the business model may not work, but I can't agree with the folks that are saying the technology and quality of the finished parts isn't quite up to par yet. There are some amazing machines available that are incredibly precise at very reasonable prices.
My son makes camera parts on a Bambu labs X1. It's a $1500 machine.
He does a lot of prototyping, but all of those are functional parts. Some of those pieces have a 1-2mm lip, and 0.8 pitch gear. That’s pretty damned precise if you ask me.
We actually print functional parts. The top lock cap is a wear item on a Miata, and the 2003-05 variant is NLA. It's exactly the sort of thing a dealership could potentially print on demand.
https://flyinmiata.com/products/03-05-top-lock-cap
But it requires a $5000 printer that has to be kept running pretty much all the time to be financially viable.
It isn't that most printers are incapable of making functional parts, its just that the parts they can make will be a very small subset of the parts needed for an old car. There are a few uses cases in there for sure.
In reply to ProDarwin :
Don't think anyone suggested doing it for all parts needed for an old car.
The OP suggested it for printing somewhat bulky or soon to be/otherwise NLA plastic parts for the vehicles they service.
An acknowledged small subset.
DocRob said:To run such a scheme would require commercial-grade additive manufacturing printers. Which are vastly more expensive than your standard hobbyist-thing. The hobbyist-grade printers are not up to the task of continuous or discontinuous use. There is a Goldilocks zone for how much they can/can't do and how often they need to be used. And you need to understand the limitations of the material properties of different printer types. You also need to be an expert in setup to get objects oriented properly for correct printing. This is a trial and error thing for the average hobbyist, but for someone running a commercial gig this is non-trivial.
Then you add in the lack of quality control. Part of buying an OEM part is that QA has occurred. No such QA would occur at a dealer or parts store. So, parts couldn't be warrantied in this way and the end result would be more and more issues. None of that spells profit to anyone.
But what would be useful is to get 3D scan files of parts. Unfortunately, I doubt seriously any OEM will be releasing those files. They are proprietary and required significant investment to make. Once released to the general public even once, those files are no longer profitable for the OEM. Even if you discontinue the product, you may want to remake it some day and losing your ability to do so for profit would be a poor business decision. And if you doubt, Aston Martin, Jaguar, BMW, and Porsche are all now building new parts for old cars for restoration purposes.
___One better solution would be for a hobbyist to purchase two 3D scanners that can accurately scan large and small parts. You could then ship your part to them which they can scan and send you back your part and copies of the files in various formats for a fee. This way you can get your own 3D files to send out to your machine shop or your 3D printer or whatever.
Example: Right now, I'm drawing up a piece to use a screw-in Moog-type balljoint to be attached to a Sunbeam Alpine/Tiger lower control arm in CAD. It would be incredibly useful to have a high-res 3D model of the original Sunbeam balljoint that I could manipulate and convert. Which would preserve the geometry better than my eyeball and angle gauge (which do work, of course). Unfortunately, I don't have a scanner on hand that can both scan to high-enough resolution and has a scan area that is large enough for a fist-sized balljoint.
The engineering work would still be done at the engineering level. The person running the printer wouldn't be responsible for selecting the material or even the orientation. They would just load whatever the machine told them to load and press print.
3D files are available for a lot of parts. I've got the full model for an LS3 engine with all the individual parts straight from GM. But that involved an industry trade association membership, justification for needing the files and an NDA. But the files are shared under the right circumstances.
In reply to SV reX :
There are a number of trim clips and similar pieces that are being recreated by hobbyists for the early CRX and Vanagon. Just the sort of thing that snaps when you're trying to work on stuff. But they're low value and low volume, which makes for a really tough business case. It's not something for the dealership level, it's at the distribution center level at least.
To the original question...
I see no business case for why this would benefit the dealerships, but it's still a bit surprising that manufacturers don't require dealerships to do it.
Manufacturers make dealerships do all kinds of stuff that has questionable business value to anyone.
DocRob said:In reply to ProDarwin :
Indeed, while 3D printers have evolved significantly in the last 10-years, they are far and away from being machines we can use for genuine small-scale manufacturing. They remain almost exclusively in the realm of fast prototyping. The machines that 3d print car parts are hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of machine. The $350 hobby things printing in PLA or other filament or even the $2500 resin-based 3D printer I have sitting in my lab right now - None of them are capable of building parts that I would want on my car. Even trim pieces, because the material properties of the filament/resin used are either not UV resistant, rigid but brittle, or flexible but not rigid. None of them are the right combination compared to tin/metal or molded plastic for use in a moving, shaking, dynamic, environment.
For prototyping purposes they work great. I can make something, print it, check the fitment, check the math, fine tune it.
If anything the real advantage to the advancement of 3D printers has been the development of open-source type software, decks, and jibs that can be repurposed into desktop-sized CNC machines.
Where does 3D Concrete Printing fit?
https://can.sika.com/en/construction/concrete-admixtures/3d-concrete-printing.html
Slippery said:In reply to Racebrick :
They have a brand that they have to protect.
Its like when you buy OE parts and they have the logo filed off. Just remove the brand and make it without the branding on it.
This kind of stuff always reminds me of the fiasco involving a Mustang forum, a calendar, and Ford becoming litigious because they claimed the calendar featured "Ford licensed products" even though they were the personal property of the forum members.
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