Any experiance using 3-d printers for parts?

[Jim Burrill]

Maybe I should say what I am trying to make....

The Humber Armoured Car uses two, two-peice cast pot metal triggers - one for the BESA remote fire and the other for the remote 37mm cannon to be fired.

The triggers hang off of some steel bar stock mounted to the side of the 37mm receiver, and were used by the Driver to grab onto to pull himself up from the side crew door. Obviously, they had a hight rate of breakage!

My HAC came without the mount or the triggers.

Clive Hughes had a project to cast repros up as a "back burner, get around to it someday" project.

A friend imported a DAC that had both triggers and let us borrow one to use for a sample.

We let the project slow-track as we had a unplanned majorengine rebuild take prescidence.

Original plan was to take the two simple halves of the trigger itself and cast a few replicas ourselves. Aside fromt he cast handles, the inside has a folded metal bit to be what your finger pulls on, and a couple of springs and alignment pins.

Technology seems to have jumped past our plan to make a mold and hand pour a couple.

It looks like a laser scan, a computer to adjust for size shrinkage, and a 3-d printer that can use something that qualifies as 'Pot metal ( or stronger) and try to order 4 of them.

If the metal looks like silver-ish pot metal, and we can smooth out the "layers" by sanding, we would call that a win. If we need to paint it to get it to look appropriate and be as strong or stronger than the original, still a win.

We also would like to have a gunsight mount scanned int he UK and the file sent to us int he States to be printed. (There are several Humber Mk4 owners that are also missing this part, so we could split the costs by 4 or 5.

OK, now who can I contact to a) gets scans made, and B) get a couple of prints made?