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My Pursuit of a Ferrari

Why Ferrari? Ferrari. What's the first thing that pops into your head when you hear that word? Ferrari as a brand is among the most recognized in the world. Everyone has heard of Ferrari, right? My first encounter with the Ferrari brand goes back to college. The owner of the apartment building I lived in when I attended the University of Miami had a Dino of some sort. I don't know exactly what model. I recall a sloped nose and shark like gills in the hood. It sounded way cooler than the noise that came out of my '71 Opel Manta. He also had a Donzi or maybe two. It seemed like he used the apartment building to house his numerous beautiful women "friends". Fast forward forty years and now I'm buying a Ferrari. At first, I didn't really know I wanted a Ferrari. I wanted a really nice, prestigious, fast, exciting car that I'd keep until they pried the keys out of my cold, dead hands. I really like the Mercedes cars, have two, and thought a good choic
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360 Scrape pads 3D printed

My 360 Spider had scrape pads under the front bumper when I purchased the car. They appeared to be pretty standard, made of HDPE or some other soft plastic, and had suffered some abuse over the years. I wanted to replace them but I didn't want to just buy new ones. Instead, I chose to manufacture my own using Fusion 360 and a Prusa MK3S+. Digitizing an existing part can be tricky, even with a 3D scanner. If the item is relatively flat, a simple method of digitizing uses finely lined (1/10") graph paper and a camera. Line the object up on the graph paper so it starts at an even measurement, and the take a picture directly from above, at a fair distance away from the object to reduce spherical aberration. In this case, the old scrape pad fit easily on one sheet, Fusion 360 has a very nice feature for importing images to use in their system. Once imported, a simple scaling operation gives the height and width. Tracing the outline and holes is quite easily The original scrape pad,

F360 - Rebuilding Front Bumper in the Most Ridiculously Difficult Manner

I was having a problem losing coolant and thought it could be somewhere in the front, like a radiator connection or something like that, so I put the car on the lift and took off the front pan. I found four of the tabs where the front pan attaches to the bumper had broken off. Bad news there! Upon closer examination, it looks like sometime in the past a former owner hit a parking wheel stop hard and crushed the left side of the lower front bumper, luckily, an area painted black. The repair had failed and the material that had been added popped off the bumper and was just hanging on by the bolts used to secure the scrape pads on the bottom of the bumper. After removing the scrape pads, I found the entire area had fractured into pieces as the material that was used in the repair just didn't stick to the bumper. The bumper had to come off and this repair had to be redone properly with better materials and surface preparation. To repair this issue, I'm going to go way beyond what a