The Deviate came with a Cane Creek Helm suspension fork. Living in Scotland, a mudguard is basically essential for 90% of the year. Luckily the fork had mounting points for a mudguard, but unfortunately, at the time, Cane Creek didn’t actually make one to suit it. Obviously, yet another opportunity for a 3D printing project.
It turned out to be a pretty good object lesson in designing for 3D printing. First of all, treating the finished item as a single object, there’s no obviously good print orientation, so the first decision was that it needed to be assembled from multiple parts. The natural split line is at the interface with the fork, so that settled that. Secondly, to get a clean print where the print head is moving uniformly in a single pass per layer, I decided to aim for the thickness of the majority of the guard to be 0.8mm, i.e. two print thicknesses (using a 0.4mm nozzle). To achieve this then, you can’t simply rotate a profile about the wheel centre, as the top down cross section will get larger the further round the rotation you get; a point I neglected with the first prototypes.
I eventually figured this out though, and redesigned to avoid the problem. I was reasonably sure I’d got it right now, so I printed, assembled and glued the “final” one, even going so far as to sand and paint it so that it looked nice. I’d occasionally hear a loud crack noise when landing big drops however, and it was a while before I made the mental connection with the mudguard, discovering this.
Clearly I had neglected to check clearances through the full range of motion of the fork, so a quick adjustment was required, ultimately resulting in a version where the support ribs had an angled cutout for clearance.
I also painted this one but soon got bored of that when it broke after lying awkwardly in the back of my van, so I stopped bothering.
I broke several more of these in similar accidents, before I got interested in alternative filaments and decided to give TPU a shot. A stiff TPU is ideal for the mudguard and virtually indestructible, so that’s where it sits right now. If you have a Helm they do sell an official mudguard now, but mine is available on printables.