Major Variant Lineup Overhaul
The NVGRA lineup has been slowly increasing over the last two years. It starts with a prospective customer asking for an NVGRA that fits their NVGs. I then dive into some number of hours of drafting after we go back & forth on dimensions. This process has improved my base design to the point that doing a revision could take less than 2 hours in many cases. Then in December of 2024 I got a Bambu X1C printer. As stated in the about section, I was impressed at the quality of models coming out of resin printers in 2022 to the point that I started the NVGRA project back up. Well Bambu FDM printers in 2025 made me want to print anything not injection molded in FDM nylon carbon fiber. With the extreme ease that printing on a Bambu printer brings, it was simple enough to add in some changes that I had been thinking about for a while, so here they are below.
Lens Lips
The NVGRA (now legacy) variants all had their lenses pressed into a track. This made the lenses very difficult to replace. Given the lens should be a replaceable part, something had to be done. With the transition to FDM nylon carbon fiber filament, heated inserts could be used to secure parts. Thus, the lens lips were born. This also opens up modularity to the lens interface that may spure some additional innovations in the future.
Updated Models
Below are the models that have been updated:
- NVGRA-31
- NVGRA-J31
- NVGRA-R31
- NVGRA-7
- [coming soon] NVGRA-15
Remember, the primary NVGRA, the NVGRA-14, is already injection molded!
Why aren’t all of these models injection molded???
The tooling cost to make a body mold for a new NVGRA variant is roughly $9,000 USD. Often, customers will ask for a variant that I will only ever sell less than 10 of. Each of those would have to be $900 to simply break even on the mold tooling cost. Now you may understand how it is better to offer some 3D printed parts to reach more customers!