Droops83

That flange looks great, Alan. We do some Audi work at my shop and I often see coolant leaks from the clip-in coolant temp sensor/O-ring on any VW/Audi from that era. Does anyone make an aftermarket metal clip for those? It might be a good option to have threaded bosses for both sensors to eliminate that possibility. The aftermarket ECU can be made to work with pretty much any common water temp sensor.

Cjar

I have a TTRS t-stat housing which gets things in a better location than the VW version, but the stat element is not sold separately. This sounds like it might be a great option.

This will be excellent. Any price estimate on the production batch? I would vote for the carbon reinforced nylon.

Craig

vt951

I looked at some more options for materials last night. An alternative I'm looking at is glass-filled nylon, which has similar properties to carbon-filled nylon but is available to be printed using a power sintering process, so no support material is needed. I'll keep looking into it. Price-wise, if I find a place that gives me a break on quantity, I hope to get the cost under $100 each. As it is now, it would be around $150 each (which is a lot, I know). I recently met with a company that does a little bit different process that works better in batches, so I'll try to get a quote for 25 or 50 of them.

Cjar

Have you checked out buildparts.com? They have a facility in Chicagoland and do SLS.

V2Rocket

how would the carbon-filled nylon perform as intake manifold stubs, you think?

vt951

I haven't yet, but I will

vt951

Could work, I think. Probably more expensive than my cast aluminum manifold will be, when you factor in the other parts needed upstream of the stubs. But, I think it could be an option for someone who wants to do their own thing.

vt951

I have seen metal clips for sale somewhere. Were they leaking because the clips broke? Or maybe the o-ring around the sensor just got hard and needed to be replaced?

one thing I’m considering doing is making this dimension taller so it’s less likely to break off.

alxdgr8

Yeah, there are metal clips available. A lot of times the thermostat housings themselves fail. Metal options would be greatly preferred. Plastic could work, but I'd worry about long-term reliability and availability. Factory made plastic housings generally don't last much more than 100k miles.

alxdgr8

Did a MASSIVE organizational update at the start of the thread. If anyone has any good topics we've discussed in the past that you'd like referenced please let me know otherwise I'll keep digging through and picking the stuff that I think is worth bookmarking. I've also put a few placeholders in there for sections that I plan on writing as I get time.

alxdgr8

Also you might want to check out https://www.protolabs.com/

vt951

I checked both of these, and they were both a lot more expensive than 3dhubs.com for this particular part in glass-filled nylon.

vt951

Thanks for summarizing there; very handy!

FrenchToast

Nice job. That's a lot of html. For those that don't write html frequently, at least.

In an effort to add something useful to this thread...

FWIW, I've read that the I5 in the 8V-chassis RS's (the current RS3 and TTRS) uses an aluminum block rather than cast iron. I have not researched if that is true however.

alxdgr8

That's correct, it's sometimes referred to as the 07k Evo. I think there's a SSP (self study program) out there that details all of the differences. They've addressed quite a few strength issues, despite moving to an aluminum block. Certainly a cool engine, but it's going to be awhile before any of those engines start becoming available in the used market for reasonable prices.