





Biggest print I've done so far. A replacement crown for a 6" vacuum truck tube.
We just got one of these trucks at my job, used for sucking up dirt and other debris in storm drains. The guys I work with are rough with it and it was heavily used already so the crown on the end of the suction hose cracked pretty catastrophically before I even saw the thing.
I took some rough measurements of what was left and threw together a model in FreeCAD. I went with 95A TPU as I figured the teeth would break off the first time you drop the aluminum hose on the ground with just about anything more rigid. It doesn't need to be too stiff anyway since its just for breaking up wet dirt.
Ideally it should be 100% infill but I went with 25% with an internal frame of 100% in what I guessed were the most important places (see last photo). This cut the print time from 38 hours to 27 hours with a .6mm nozzle and .32mm layer height. I could definitely print faster but just played it safe with the default flex profile. It fit perfectly, does the job, and held up well. The second to last photo is after a pretty rough first day.
Only time will tell how it holds up long term but with the original part being in the ballpark of $100 I can print a dozen before approaching that, not to mention the time it would take for my city job to approve and purchase the replacement.