History - Hoglet/HPD_F1 GitHub Wiki

How it all started.

In 2015 I was attending a competition in Östersund and a guy there wanted me to try F1 so he gave me a chassis (a 3Racing FGX ). I mounted electronics in it and entered the competition.

The car was extremely twitchy, low top speed, and as soon as I touched anything it broke... The race was difficult, I had to be extremely careful with throttle, brake and steering. In short: I loved it!

Looking at the car's performance and durability and having been listening to my friends talk about 3D printing I was thinking: "I can do better than this"

What is in the name?

HPD is an old way of naming things home made. I first heard it in the late 1980s when somebody had CNCd half of a buggy. The name is a shortening of "HopPlockade Delar" which translates to "Collected parts" with the inner meaning of "Built of things laying around".

In the US there is a similar way of saying the same: "Redneck Engineering"

The beginnings

I started to learn CAD and bought a cheap Chinese 3D printer. Looking at the rear suspension of an old 1:12 car I put together a rear suspension, added a chassis and a front without suspension.

In December of 2015 the first tentative laps of the HPD was made: Prototype run

The journey

The following months was a series of steady improvements, spectacular crashes and a lot of laughs. I had to find better materials as the standard PLA locally available was not up for the job and the way I designed the parts was not exactly optimal.

The unexpected win

On the first outdoor competition that year I had a car that could do a race in decent tempo and, surprise, I managed to get Pole Position and actually win.

Derivatives

During the years people have been making mods to the car and some are so different that they are really a completely unique creation. One such example is the HPD Lexan which has one or two parts in common with the HPD F1 that it started from.

The HPD Lexan was very successful and the designer used it to win the "Mid Swedish Cup" in 2018. Se here what Daniel Norée wrote about it: 3D Printing Just Changed Forever