3D-printed valve cap for a Besson euph.
The euph player in one of my bands picked up this older instrument to use for marching, because it’s about half the weight of her York euph, and it’s already kind of beat up, thus not a huge loss if it gets dropped. It was missing a lower valve cap, and of course I didn’t have one in the correct size in my parts collection. I can probably source one from another tech’s boneyard, but there was no time for shipping before the next parade.
So I made a temporary fix with the help of Autodesk’s Fusion360 drafting/modelling software, and one of the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus 3D printers at the local makerspace. Total print time was 45min.
The piece obviously isn’t a perfect replica of the originals; I simplified it a bit so I wouldn’t have to do any clean-up of support structures, and bulked it out by a millimetre or so in places to make it tougher and better able to handle the constant mechanical stresses of holding the valve spring.
All it really had to do was survive until the end of the parade.
When 3D printers that can print metals get down to a price point where hobbyists or small makerspaces can afford to have their own, instead of having to outsource it to places like Shapeways, we are going to start seeing some really cool shit.
