3D Print Parts that Fit with FREE Conversion Calculator

hey everybody Chris here from its me made and today is all about making parts that actually fit together so let's not waste any more time and get into this [Music] video all right real quick I just wanted to get this this little disclaimer out of the way now when it comes to sizing your parts and getting them fitting perfectly this is the method that I use so I'm not saying that this is the right way I'm not saying it's the wrong way I'm just saying before we get started this is my way of doing it so we've all 3D printed something that has multiple pieces and parts and sometimes we find ourselves trying to make those pieces and parts fit together and they just won't and most of the time and I'm not going to say all the time but most of the time the 3D artist that is actually modeling this stuff doesn't actually 3D print so they don't fully understand all of those tolerances that we need to be able to make our pieces fit together in a good way so they're usually so tight and we have to sand them and things like that so I actually have a solution for you in this video for those specific instances but it's going to work some of the time not all the time and we'll get into that and the other thing is if you're the one actually modeling your pieces I'm going to show you how to actually get the right sizes and dimensions to make your tolerances fit beautifully now to start this project off I had to have something to actually 3D print so I jumped over to Tinker Cad and created this wonderful little Cube and it is 40 mm x 40 mm and I then cut it in half and I made a peg on one side and a hole on the other now this Peg is 25 mm on the X and 25 mm on the Y the hole is the exact same Dimension so there is no changing of the dimensions here it is an exact perfect fit so then I threw it into Cura sliced it up and then put it on my jump drive and headed down to the workshop and threw this on my FL Sun v400 Delta printer and the filament I decided to go with was my polymaker pla so once it was all printed I took it off the printer and this is what I got and as you can see it doesn't really fit together very well like I can force it in but not all the way and it just I don't know it just wasn't working out so I realized that my Dimensions were not printing accurately so I first need to know how inaccurate my 3D prints are so I took my calipers and I started measuring and I found out that my prints are pretty much about 0.1 millimeters off and it's about .1 mm on the inside and .1 mm on the outside so I know that those were the things wrong with my prints so once I had the numbers the next thing is is to jump over to my special tool that I've created in Google Sheets and let me show you what that does so I've developed this special scale conversion calculator that way I can figure out how inaccurate my prints actually are so for what we're actually doing I figured out that my model the p is supposed to be 25 mm by 25 mm so that's where I'm going to put my actual dimensions of the model right here then I figured that the printed size is actually 25.10 mm by 25.10 mm and that is going to give me the exact scaling that I need to be able to change this in Kira to be able to get an accurate print now I'm going to give this calculator to everybody for free so you can use it whenever you want now the one thing is is when you go into this file make sure you go into file make a copy that way you can copy it because you're not going to be able to edit it the way it is right now you have to be able to duplicate it into your Google Drive and the last thing for those of you that are already subscribed to my newsletter and to get emails from me check your email because I actually already sent the to you so now that I have my new conversion scale of 99.6% I'm ready to scale this in Cura so I'm just going to select both of these models make sure I have uniform scaling on and then I'm just going to go to one and do 99.6 and then hit tab just to make sure that everything is 99.6 and we are good so now I'm ready to slice this and throw it back on my 3D printer so once that second print was done I went ahead and took it off the printer and tried to fit it and I tell you what this it fits but I mean you really have to force it together and you can see I mean it is a very very tight fit and when I measured it it's actually pretty accurate it is about 0.01 to 03 mm off which is really good which means this is an accurate 3D print but there's no tolerance and that's the big thing here you need to have some tolerance because when you have two exact sizes putting together I mean you're going to have a hard time like putting these together and getting them apart so once I realized that my printer was actually printing it at an accurate size with my new size conversion for this model the next thing was to figure out my t tolerance so I can get it to fit really nicely and not as tough as this now what the tolerance is is it's that little extra Gap to be able to have your pieces slide in and out easily so when they are a good tolerance you can see it goes in and out really easily but the big thing is we need to figure out what that tolerance is and that is where I run over to thingverse and grab this this is actually a tolerance Checker and I really like this print because it is so easy to read and you know what is going to work for you now I'll go ahead and put a link to this down below in the description for you so you can print this so let me show you how this works and how you can find your tolerance all right real quick I just have to say thank you thank you to all of these amazing people for supporting me on patreon this month if you want to be like these awesome people you will get exclusive access to my private Discord Channel channels where we talk about printing painting softwares and everything else in between and you'll also be able to see all of my behind the scenes content of what I'm working on and what's going on in the workshop but I just wanted to say thank you guys other than that let's get back to the video so this one actually starts at 05 and goes all the way up to 1.3 and that means there is 1.3 mm Gap in between here and you can see how loose this is and that obviously prints just fine and you can see right there but the rest of these why I like this so much they actually have little like levers that you can actually see how loose of a fit this is so if I wanted my actual 3D prints to feel this loose then I know I could do a 1.1 and this would be my new tolerance but I mean this is so loose I can pull this out like that's how bad this one is but if you make your way through here you can actually see it starts to get Tighter and Tighter until we get to a 0 five and the0 five is what I really like because the tolerance is good you don't see a lot of wobble in it when you're going back and forth and also I just I think I want it a little looser to be able to flow freely and when it comes to the fit of my 3D print I want it to be able to slide in just fine so a0 five is what I want now the one thing is this model actually comes with two versions a version that everything is a lot tighter and then this one is where it's a lot looser and I knew that mine was going to be either a 0.5 or a 6 just because of I've printed these things before and I knew how tight my printer was going to be able to allow and this is one of those things over time you're just going to kind of get it and you're going to know like all right this is probably the best tolerance for me to use for this model and for me it's going to be the5 mm because I mean it is it doesn't like move smoothly but it does move freely and that's the thing like you can see up and down there's not very much wobble versus over here look at how much wobble we have on that but here I mean not a whole lot and that's what you want to look at and I'm not telling you that you know this is what you want to go with or this is what you want to go with it really is all up to you you want to make sure that you have a tolerance that you're comfortable with for whatever you're actually printing but once we have the tolerance we want then we're ready to jump back over to the calculator to add this into our measurements so we know what to scale this in in Kira or whatever modeling program you're actually doing your project in so now that we know our tolerance we can take that and put it into the calculator so let's jump over there and let me show you how to do that so now that we know what the tolerance we want to go with with our 3D print we can actually add this into the calculator and the big thing to remember is we have two different ways that we can deal with our tolerance we can reduce the amount of tolerance or we can increase the amount of tolerance so if we wanted to reduce our tolerance that is actually going to make it tighter in increasing the size of our 3D print so just for example if I put in 5 mm right here you can see that we're going to have to scale this to 119% but if I put in 5 mm here it's actually going to reduce it down to 79% so that's just a big thing to remember when you're reducing and increasing and the differences because if we put five here and five here you're going to see that nothing's going to change because it evens itself out so the big thing to realize is one of these should always be zero and the other one should be the tolerance that you are adding or taking away so for this we are actually going to be increasing our tolerance by a 05 mm all right so this is where the Divide happens you're either a person that just takes the model and 3D prints it or you're the person that also is 3D modeling the file so let's take these on one at a time first let's talk about the person that is just 3D printing you're not a 3D modeler and that's fine but what we're going to do is jump over to cira and I'm going to show you how we can scale these down to make sure our parts and pieces are going to fit together nicely so jumping back to the calculator we can look over here again and see that we need to scale to a 97.6 1% so this is the exact measurement we need to do to be able to add in our actual tolerance so let's jump over to Cura now here's the thing we actually have our new tolerance that we know we need to scale this to and last time we actually scaled both of these pieces to 99.6 but this time we only want to scale one of them because if we scale both of these equally then we're going to be running into the exact same issue to where they are going to be such a tight fit but it's going to be a smaller fit so all we have to do is realize that we are going to be shrinking this down we want to use the actual Peg because we want this Peg to be smaller so all we have to do is come over here to our scale and change this to 97.6 1 and hit enter and now we have scaled this one down and it is ready to print so let's go ahead and slice this and then then throw this on the 3D printer so once we have it 3D printed there's a few things that you can notice that obviously the top is a different size and it's not perfectly smooth so if this is a model of like an arm attaching to a torso that might not be that noticeable and that is where you can really get away with this stuff being able to print it maybe just 1% or whatever the calculator tells you of how much smaller you should print this to be able to make it fit really well for you now this is the other thing if you actually need it to print and be perfectly precise this method is not going to work for you very well and you're probably going to have to reach out to the modeler and let them know that hey these parts don't fit together very well and you're going to have to decrease the size of the peg it sucks but there's a lot of bottles out there that just don't fit together no matter what you do so you're going to have to scale them or see if the artist will do it for you so for those of you that are actually 3D modeling Your Parts you know it's a perfect world for you because all you have to do is now that you know your tolerance you just got to go in and change the peg to be that exact size so we knew that my tolerance is a .5 mm so instead of a 25 mm Peg I'm going to make it 24.5 mm leave this hole right here at 25 mm and guess what it fits beautifully so now you actually know how to get your parts to fit perfectly and sometimes I tell you what it's not going to work out it's just if they don't fit they don't fit and sometimes you just got to take some sandpaper to it and let her go or just take a Dremel that's what I've done multiple times I'll just Dremel the heck out of something and then surprisingly it fits beautifully because there's no more Peg and it's just a nub but those are some options that might help you in the future now I had used this few times for certain models that where arms will actually go into the Torso or a leg will go into the Torso and they just don't fit well so I'll print the leg again and I will use my little calculator tool to realize that okay I need to bring this down at 99.2% that way I can get it to fit a lot nicer and this will help you a lot because when it comes to some of those models for us that are painting stuff it really doesn't matter most of the time if it's scaled down a tiny bit because nobody's going to know trust me no one is going to know well you'll know and it's just something you're going to have to get over I'm sorry now like I said in the beginning I I know that this is not for everybody but I feel like for a vast majority of us that are just 3D printing dud ads and things like that that aren't printing a specific thing for to fit in a certain area but they're more pretty things and like models for us to paint this method is going to work beautiful for you because we don't care if it's just a little bit smaller nobody's going to know and it's going to fit good and then you can actually glue it together and even putty the seams to where nobody can even tell that that was a different size maybe that's exactly what the model was supposed to look like but for those of you that are very like no it has to be absolutely perfect well then I you're going to have to model yourself or you're going to have to talk to the modeler and if you're not the modeler I'm sorry sometimes it's really difficult to try to get a hold of an artist to be able to change something so it'll 3D print better for you but all in all I hope this video has helped you and you know what if you have a different method of doing what I'm showing you I I would love to hear about it in the comments tell me what you do and how is it different because I know there are so many different ways of like making your prints and parts fit perfectly so leave them down below and I I I I just I'm really curious to hear what you guys have to say about this and that's it I just want to say thank you so much for watching I hope you have a great day and I'll go ahead and I'll see you over here in this next video

Channel: ItsMeaDMaDe

Views: 38,752

Keywords: 3D Printing, Tolerance Adjustment, Scale Conversion Calculator, Fitting 3D Printed Parts, 3D Printing Tips, Model Slicing, Cura Slicing Software, 3D Modeling, 3D Print Calibration, TinkerCad Design, Filament Selection, Accurate 3D Prints, 3D Printing Techniques, DIY 3D Printing, Print Accuracy Improvement, 3D Printer Troubleshooting, Custom 3D Printing Solutions, Prototyping and Design, 3D Print Fitting Solutions, 3D Print Customization, parts, 3d printing for beginners

Id: k9Twexcs_tY

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024