The ivory color plastic trim on the driver's door of my 41 is in bad shape, warped, shrank, and basically desintegrating. I believe this trim was never available as a spare part and seems was pressed into the chrome bezel at the factory. I decided to try fabricating the part using 3D printing available at my local public library. I show a few photos to illustrate the results of this process. It took 4 visits to the library and a total of 6 hours until a nearly identical piece could be printed. I then took them home and finished them to look just like a very good match of the other existing trim pieces.


A printed piece next to an original damaged one. The red spots are from putty used to correct minor printing defects on the grooves. The old one looks smaller because it shrank.




Before painting, I sanded smooth all the edges to duplicate the original. The paint name is Maple2 that I got from the wood graining company Grain It Technologies. Is the closest match I could find, but slightly darker than the ivory. The grooves are challenging because the printer was not the best quality and some of the melted plastic bridged across and caused minor chips on some edges. It was a work of patience to make the grooves more straight and even using a small file but the final product shows a good result.




It fits just perfectly. This one is clear coated and again some imperfection in the groove is seen that had to be filled up and filed, repainted, recoated, etc. until good.




The 2 new ones temporarily attached and compared with both original damaged ones. I will glue them to the chrome base instead of using the original plastic tabs that snap into the chrome holes.

I don't claim they are perfect but they are much better than the old ones. You will notice the the center trim pieces, the 3 parallel strips, are lighter in color. They look in pretty good shape and I don't know if they are supposed to be of a different color. However, they look newer and previous owner may have replaced some of them. The rear doors of my car have these pieces of ivory color, not so white as the front doors do.

I have saved files to print both the center and the side trim pieces. Files are in STL format and I can provide them to anyone interested for his personal use. Don't know what years other than 1941 use this trim but I presume is not exclusive for 41s. I was told at the library that the print will be very smooth if the highest resolution printer is used. That will translate to minimal need for sanding and the grooves will be sharper.. For me, the reward is to be able to fabricate one by myself and to keep the interior of my old driver looking quite stock. Manuel.

 

Nice work there

 

Thats frickin amazing..great job and patience..

 

Beautiful, outside the box thinking well done.