Vase Mode 1/10 Scale RC Car Body

This is a proof of concept model for an idea that has been bouncing around my head for a while.  Traditional RC car bodies are simple, but weirdly expensive.  It's just a piece of vacuum-formed polycarbonate, but they cost $20-$50.  There are lots of 3D printable bodies, but most are scaler bodies that are insanely complicated.  And even the basic ones take more than half a spool of filament and many, many hours to print.  There has to be a better way!

Well now there is.  By leveraging the power of “not really caring what it looks like”, I designed a vaguely-car-shaped shell that prints in 3 parts in vase mode.  Simply print the 3 pieces as provided, cut out the wheel wells and dividers, and glue them together.  It helps to leave ~10mm worth of the divider walls in place to add a bit of rigidity and give you something to glue to.  I found that hot glue worked a heck of a lot better than superglue.  I also strongly recommend using at least 0.7mm line width.  PETG would probably work even better than the trash-tier PLA that I went with, simply to use it up.  The whole body took about 3.5hrs to print on a bambu X1C and only used 200g of filament.

Now I know it looks like hot buttered garbage.  That comes down to a combination of the tricky geometric limitations of vase mode models, my inability to use proper modeling software, and my complete lack of aesthetic sensibilities.  The point is that it works at all.  My hope is that somebody who know what the hell they're doing will use this technique to design other vase mode bodies that actually look good.  Simply adding some indentations for windows and body panels would go a long way to making it look like an actual car (not to mention adding some much-needed rigidity).  Please, I beg of you, take this concept and run with it.