As most of you already know I am a big fan of Mini Coopers and I am happy and proud to say that I own one. A great little car that looks great, drives great, and gives me exceptional gas mileage. With all of that what could be bad about it? Right? Well I found out this week when I had a very small part disappear from my car. On the drivers door handle of my 2014 Mini Cooper is a small plastic cover that hides the opening where a key would normally be used to open the door. This opening on my car is still there it is just covered up and only used in case of an emergency where the battery powered remote had a dead battery and you still needed to open the door. The small plastic cover would be removed and then an actual key that is already built into the remote can be removed and used to open the car door. To my surprise this week I found out that this little cover had gone missing.
Somewhere in my travels over one day it simply fell off of the car. I did some searching only for the nearest Mini Cooper forum and sure enough this is a common occurrence. Other owners like me have been complaining about this part falling off of the car as well. Not a good sign.
So I called my local Mini Cooper dealership and inquired about this little plastic part that is no bigger than your thumb to see if I could get a replacement. To my astonishment I was quoted a price of $48 (plus tax) for a grand total of $50 for a little plastic part. I turned the offer down and told them that being a retired industrial designer and owning a 3D printer now was the order of the day. The gentleman at the parts department agreed with me whole heartedly and so my mission for that day was clear. Make a new part!
This is what my door handle looked like with the little plastic cover now missing. Not a pretty sight to be sure. My original cover was black and so I had that bit of information to start. The passenger
door did not have this cover so I could get a good close look at it and possibly take measurements. So I had to start from scratch.
These images of chrome covers that I found online were exactly what I was looking for. But no way was I willing to pay $50 for a piece of plastic around the size of your thumb!
Here's another good shot from online showing you exactly what kind of scale this part is to the car as well as someone's hand. On one end of the cover is a small tab and the opposite end is a small raised bar. All plastic.....no metal.
After three or four tries to get the outer cover shaped to match the handle I came up with what you see here. I 3D printed the part and fit it to the opening in the door handle. It looked to be right on for shape and size so I pressed on.
Here's view of the underside of the cover. This had a simple "L" shaped configuration with a small wedge on one end. To get the locking mechanism to work I printed the "L" shape without the cover first so I could see what was going on. This again took several tries and so the last step was to combine these to parts into one. This was a simple matter of using Fusion 360 CAD software and dialing in the part to have it print all in one piece. Once I had the part 3D printed I wet sanded it smooth with 600 grit wet/dry sand paper. Then I primed the part as you see in the photos above.
After the primer had dried properly I wet sanded the outer face of the cover once again and finally added a couple of coats of gloss black spray paint.
Lastly when the part had dried for 24 hours I took it out to my car and carefully slid the part into place with a nice steady pressure. The part went "Click" and looks to be secure. Just to make sure that the new cover will not also disappear I added a very small amount of silicone sealer to one end of the underside of the cover. A very small amount. I will keep my eye on my new cover over the coming weeks to make sure I have this all dialed in the way I want. But for right now I think I have the best replacement part in the world when I can 3D print it and only cost me 3 cents instead of $50! Plus the fact that if ever I should loose this one I can do a bit more tweaking to the design to improve upon it if I have to and reprint a new part in less than an hour. Works for me every time!
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