Drift cars are cool, but they’re also expensive. If you don’t have money for endless tires, fuel, and engine rebuilds, you might like to get involved at the RC scale instead. [Max Imagination] has just the build to get you started.

The design uses 3D printing for the majority of the chassis. Rigidity is front of mind, as is creating the right  steering and suspension geometry for smooth, controllable drifts. The drivetrain is 3D-printed too, using plastic gears and universal-joint axles combined with off-the-shelf bearings. Steering is controlled via an off-the-shelf servo, with a brushless motor putting power down to all four wheels. While drifting at full scale is best achieved with rear-wheel-drive, it’s easier to control at the small scale with four driven wheels.

True to the DIY ethos, an Arduino-based RC system is used to drive the steering servo and motor speed controller, with a home-built pistol-grip controller. It also activates a small power supply which runs little humidifier modules, which turn water into a visible vapor for a fun smoke effect. It doesn’t really imitate tire smoke, since it disappears nearly the instant the car moves, but it’s still a neat effect.

It’s a neat build that makes a great starting point for your dive into RC. Meanwhile, if you’re more about speed than getting sideways, we’ve seen a homebrew RC car designed to that end as well. Video after the break.

Most 3D printer filament soaks up water from the air, and when it does, the water passing through the extruder nozzle can expand, bubble, and pop, causing all kinds of mayhem and unwanted effects in the print. This is why reels come vacuum sealed. Some people 3D print so much that they consume a full roll before it can soak up water and start to display these effects. Others live in dry climates and don’t have to worry about humidity. But the rest of us require a solution. To date, that solution has been filament dryers, which are heated elements in a small reel-sized box, or for the adventurous an oven put at a very specific temperature until the reel melts and coats the inside of the oven. The downside to this method is that it’s a broad stroke that takes many hours to accomplish, and it’s inefficient because one may not use the whole roll before it gets soaked again.

In much the same way that instant water heaters exist to eliminate the need for a water heater, [3DPI67] has a solution to this problem, and it involves passing the filament through a small chamber with a heating element and fan circulating air. The length of the chamber is important, as is the printing speed, since the filament needs to have enough time in the improvised sauna to sweat out all its water weight. The temperature of the chamber can’t get above the glass transition temperature of the filament, either, which is another limiting factor for the dryer. [3DPI67] wrote up a small article on his improvised instant filament heater in addition to the video.

So far, only TPU has been tested with this method, but it looks promising. Some have suggested a larger chamber with loops of filament so that more can be exposed for longer. There’s lots of room for innovation, and it seems some math might be in order to determine the limits and optimizations of this method, but we’re excited to see the results.