If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a 10″ TPU tyre will never go flat, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.
The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for truly open-sourcing the design instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.
As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.
While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will outperform any other plastic he might have printed. This project is probably more practical than a 3D printed bicycle tyre, which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy.
I have been making a wheel as well (as wheel?) for a groceries cart and have been philosophizing/engineerizing about wheels. I wanted to make a good wheel out of rigid material, so I thought about adding those grooves for extra traction.
I realized you need to split/offset the grooves otherwise the cart while bobble up and down due to radius variations from deep grooves — intentionally or not that’s why the lego wheels are like that I believe.
Also interesting, there’s the interesting question of whether you need grooves at all for a “passive” wheel that isn’t under active traction? I haven’t reached a definite conclusion, but there are interesting observations in this case (a nice physics puzzle, I think). Can anyone prove grooves make or don’t make a difference?
Back in my days of street racing, the grooves provided some place for collected water to go which provided much more traction wet. May not be applicable here
The purpose of grooves would be to provide traction on a surface that is dirty/sandy/rocky/wet. The grooves let the tire push against that debris. So I would think that they are not particularly desirable unless you are using the wheels for power/braking/steering (i.e. you actually need traction) AND the surface is not very clean.
In situations where the ground surface is very clean, the grooves actually decrease your traction because they reduce the total surface area contacting the ground.
Think of the wheels on a train car. They are solid metal disks without texture. Or drag racing tires, which are called “slicks” because they have no ridges. They optimize for greater strength and more contact with the ground rather than the ability to steer on dirty surfaces.
a 10″ TPU tyre THAT will never go flat
In term of number, LEGO is the #1 producer of tires in the world. They also have longer lifespan, I still got some 50 years old LEGO tires that are good. Other brand tires like Goodyear would have dry-rotted or gone bald after maybe 10 years.
Its actually not uncommon for old Lego tires to dry rot, harden, and fall apart. But they use a different formulation now that shouldn’t.