Project Hellcat: Custom 3D-Printed Coat Hooks

Airwolf 3D Intern Prescott Campbell is back with a new project: custom 3D-printed coat hooks for the Hellcat, one of Airwolf 3D’s favorite project cars.

In the SRT Hellcat Challenger, the two hooks for hanging clothes above the rear windows are made of black Polycarbonate-ABS. Because I’ve been tasked with creating custom parts for the Airwolf 3D Hellcat project car, I thought I would make a red replacement hook that helped enhance the red and black color scheme of the car’s interior.

Just as I did with the 3D-printed cup holder, I started my design by recreating the features that allow the part to fit in the car. It was more difficult to recreate the back of this part accurately because the part contained organic and angular shapes of different heights with a hole for a screw running through all of it.

Once I was satisfied with my re-creation of the back of the part, I started on the new design of the actual hook. At first, I tried to make the new design somewhat similar to the original design.

On the original injection-molded part, the screw is accessed by a door with a very thin piece of plastic acting as a hinge. Because features like this cannot be 3D printed, I designed the component with a large hole through the part so the screw still could be accessed. I printed the part using ABS (because I wanted the part to be red) and HydroFill Water-Soluble Support. Once it was done printing, I decided I actually wanted the hook to be a lot smaller. This would add more strength, which I thought was necessary since I was printing the part in ABS instead of the stronger PC/ABS thatthe original hook was made out of.

Before I began making a smaller version of the part, I installed the hook in the car to make sure that my re-creation of the back features fit properly. Gladly, the part fit well and I could focus on the new hook design.

The new design I came up with is more compact and stronger. Here’s what it looks like in SolidWorks:

I loaded the part in APEX and duplicated it because I would need two — one for each side of the car. I positioned the parts so that the intricate features would be facing up and they could be printed without support material, resulting in a cleaner part that needed little to no post-processing. I used APEX’s ABS with HydroFill “Standard” settings, but made some changes. To make the part stronger, I doubled the shell thickness to two, and increased the fill density to 40.

Once the hooks were done printing, I installed them in the car using the screws from the original part. The new red hooks add extra visual interest to the interior of the Hellcat without sacrificing the strength of the original factory parts.

I’ll be continuing to design and 3D-print more custom parts for the Airwolf 3D Hellcat project car, so stay tuned!

ABOUT PRESCOTT

Airwolf 3D Summer Intern Prescott Campbell is a junior at Corona Del Mar High School in Newport Beach, CA. With his passion for cars and experience using Airwolf 3D printers on his school’s robotics team, Prescott joined the Wolfpack to help work on custom 3D-printed parts for the Dodge SRT Hellcat Challenger.

The 3D-Printed Coat Hooks are part of The 3D-Printed Hellcat Project by Airwolf 3D. Join us as race to finish up our 3D-printed car parts in time for the SEMA Show 2017.

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This is a one-page informational sheet for automotive 3d printing.  Read this for a quick overview of 3d printing in the automotive sector.