I recently started working on a personal project that I wanted to share, to gauge interest in the 3rd gen community. The projected is focused on the decal/insert in certain factory center caps (see example below). These custom inserts will be made to fit into stock style center cap housings like those shown below.

Stock style center caps

I have the capability to:
1) Produce custom designs
2) Construct those designs using rapid prototyping
3) Convert rapid prototyped parts into durable metal products

In short these inserts can be modeled/designed, 3D printed, and then painted to achieve the desired finish or use metal casting to produce a high-end, custom part. Below are some images of the "prototype" design that I'm using for concept validation.



I'm looking forward to hearing what thoughts, questions, and interest the group has around this project!

 

Pretty creative. Nice work.
Center is almost unreadable though, too geometric. Painting the letters will help tremendously with that issue.

 

Thanks for that feedback!

Painting the letter is a great idea. I'll put together another rendering with painted letters. That should help quite a bit with clarifying the geometry.

 

Letters around the outer circle are fine. It's just the letters in the center that look too wire-frame and strain the eyes a bit trying to figure out what it says.

 

I updated the rendering with paint in the letters and I think it looks significantly better. It seems to have resolved a lot of the wire-frame look when everything was the polished finish. I tried a couple different colors, but my taste prefers the simple black!

 

That's cool.

 

I like 'em. -with the black!

 

Thanks for the feedback! I'm going to keep moving forward with this design and will keep updating this thread as I make progress.

If there's any more feedback or if you have ideas for other designs, let me know and I'll see if I can put together a model/rendering!

 

So I decided to make some plastic inserts, since the metal inserts will take a little more time to get going. My plan is to paint the outside one color (silver) and the inside letters another color (black). Below is picture of the first plastic insert (prior to paint) placed in the center cap. Once I finish painting I'll post the "finished product".


Here's another situation I came across: I ordered what I believe to be aftermarket or reproduction blank center caps (no inserts). They came today and I was surprised to find that the I.D. of the insert is ~0.050" larger on the ones I ordered vs the one I took off my car. You wouldn't think it is a huge difference, but it's enough that my insert is loose in the center cap and the fit/finish looks poor. I'll have to increase the OD of my insert by 0.050" to correct the issue. I'm curious if anyone knows if there was a change to the center caps at some point or if this is just the result of variations in reproduction?

"Factory" on the left, New Reproduction on the right.

 

I was able to get the prototype painted this weekend and thought I'd share the results. I'm definitely curious on your feedback!

 

It' been a little while since I posted on this project, so I thought I would give an update on the latest progress.

I have a customer that wanted custom center caps for his C8 Corvette.
- He bought a 2nd set of OEM center caps and I was able to remove the outer insert so that I had the base structure that attached the center cap to the wheel.
- He sent me an image of what he wanted on the center cap, and I was able to provide him a 3D rendering of the design.
- Once approved I went ahead and 3D printed the caps, followed by paint/finishing.
- In the end the customer got a really cool personalized center cap that looks really good on the car!