Making Manifolds with additive manufacturing

The Problem

The Manifold

Benefits:

With Additive manufacturing there is no tooling cost. Additive manufacturing is a relatively affordable technique to manufacture small parts.

Another advantage is form freedom. For example, I tried to get price-quotes to have the PD24 manifold machined in aluminium, and most suppliers told me they just couldn’t machine this shape out of 1 piesce because the geometry is too complex.

you can make many versions

Disadvantages:

The cost of production doesn’t really drop when making bigger quantities. So ‘economies of scale’ are limited. In this case, this not an issue, because the market for CY bikes is very small 🙂

Durability: there is no proof that these parts will last long under thermal and physical load.

The Material

The manifolds are laser-sintered from Alumide, an interesting mix nylon and aluminium. I wrote a bit more on this blogpost.