We usually receive news about peculiar prints like clothing or food, but advances are also being made in other fields such as industrial. A) Yes a mechanical engineer has managed to print a Toyota engine with a Prusa.
The mechanical engineer is called Eric Harrell, a mechanic who was fond of 3D printing and who saw how the creation of an engine was only intended for large companies that with their large machines manage to print such complicated parts.
Willing to break these ideas, Eric Harrell got down to work and between the Thingiverse repository and his knowledge he has created the necessary parts and designs to be able to print a Toyota engine, specifically the Toyota 4 Cylinder Engine 22RE engine.
Although the principles of this project were tough, the results as you can see in the photos are magnificent. In addition, this entire engine has only consumed 1 kg of PLA material, we are going to be a pack of PLA in any store. Regarding the printing of the pieces, Harrell comments that the project has taken 72 hours to print and 60 hours to design the pieces. In total an engine with more than 80 parts.
The Toyota engine is made up of 80 parts and has consumed 1 kg. by PLA
Harrell has put all of Toyota's engine designs into Thingiverse and he cautions that although it can be done with a normal Prusa, the printer must be examined quite often so that a bad calibration does not create a defective part.
Although personally I do not know to what extent a plastic engine can work in a normal car, this project is interesting since it can allow us to save many hundreds of euros with highly personalized parts that the big motor brands charge to piece of gold and that with less than 24 euros (it is the average price at which the kilo of PLA is) we can solve these problems.