5 Tips to start designing your own 3D printed parts - Tinkercad

so you've got your own 3d printer but you're yet to design and print your own parts well here are five essential tips to help you do just that [Music] [Music] if you've just got your first 3d printer there's a good chance you've set it up probably done the test prints on the SD card and maybe ventured onto Thingiverse on my manufactory to find some pre-made files to print you might be thinking that you'd like to have a go at designing and printing your own items but you just don't know where to start well this video is going to present five essential tips to get you going so you can design the right type of parts for successful 3d printing we're going to use Tinkercad because it's free easy to use and doesn't need any installation we're also going to look at some real world practical examples demonstrating with blocks as well as some test prints but let's get started with a very short lesson on Tinkercad and then after that jump straight into the tips Tinkercad is very user friendly for beginners we have all of our shapes on the side and to use any of them we simply drag them to the middle of the screen we can then click and drag the object to move it around or use this black arrow to move things up and down if we drag from the white dots in the corner we can resize and the one in the center will resize vertically you'll also notice as these floating arrows here we can use that to rotate the parts camera control is essential sometimes you won't see the right set of arrows until you look from the right direction we can drag it as many shapes as we want and build them up and get them to overlap before finally selecting both and coming up to the group button to merge them into one we can also do something very similar if we want to make some holes we can drag out any shape and then instead of a color we can set it to whole resize it move it into position and then once again select everything and click group as you can see the shape that was set to be a hole has eaten out of the other shape and given us our desired geometry beyond the many shapes found in the basic shape section you can also access the drop-down and look at all the other ones on offer if you come to shape generators and then click all you'll have many many options most of which are customizable for instance this gear we drag it out to the middle and then we'll be presented with a dialog box working set the parameters for our gear that way when we 3d print it we know everything's gonna mesh perfectly and it's going to function as we would expect on top of these easy-to-use tools we'll find features that you would find in many other programs such as copy and paste with control C and then control V to make a copy we can also do similar things with these buttons at the top as well as two leading shapes when we're finished designing we simply come up to export and click the SDL button our file will download and be ready for 3d printing now that we've got some understanding of the software let's get into our tips tip number one is to design parts with a flat base this one seems pretty obvious but you'd be amazed how many times people get it wrong let's consider a pyramid if we try to build it upside down we have a single block touching the ground and then four above that and then much larger above that and it doesn't take much sense to know that that's not going to work if we start the other way around with a wide stable base and then build up towards the point it's very easy quite often my students will present something like this to me is ready to print because this is the way the diamond faces when you drag it out from Tinkercad it won't be long into your 3d printing journey that you discover how important first layer adhesion is and after a few layers this one gets knocked loose and starts printing spaghetti a lot of the time the solution is as easy as flipping the part around to reorient it quite often without modifying the geometry we can achieve a much more stable and reliable print by doing this if you don't have this option you can always try adding a raft in the slicing software which will enlarge the footprint and increase your chances of success what about if we've got a really round shape and it's not possible to spin it around in any particular direction to get a flat bottom like these four spheres here well here's a little tip for you you can drag out a box and you can make it really oversized and really big basically bigger than the object we're then going to move it down and spin the camera so we can see exactly where it is I'm gonna bring it up to it just overlaps my shape now I can drag a box around everything and this box will cut a chunk off the bottom of my other shape and give it a relatively flat base so now has a chance of printing successfully tip number two is to avoid steep overhangs the job of the slicer in 3d printing is to slice the object vertically because it's built from the ground up layer by layer what does this mean for us as we're designing in Tinkercad well to demonstrate I've designed this very simple part that shows what will and won't work this geometry has three features and angled overhang a bridge overhang in the center and then a cantilevered overhang on the right which isn't supported at all in the earliest phases of the print we can see that the angled overhang is in effect we'll note that if we build with the blocks we can have slight overhangs but if they get too steep it collapses the same works with 3d printing you can see on the left here this 45-degree overhang is printed without any trouble at all the same effect is found on this overhang test which changes 10 degrees every few millimeters you can see at the base everything's quite smooth but it reaches a certain amount of overhang and from there everything starts to droop things get interesting when we get to the other two overhangs we can see as it gets to this area it will in fact be printing in mid air the results for the bridge overhang and the cantilever overhang couldn't be more different as you can see the bridge has something supported on both sides and it can safely make it across the cantilevered overhang however is hanging down vertically because it's only supported on one side with the blocks it's really easy to demonstrate a stable bridge for the cantilevered overhang it seems obvious that it's never really going to work although as more and more layers added it does a surprisingly good job of recovering and forming the geometry we were after quite often we start our students with designing key rings and they come up with something like this the arms represent a massive problem because as we get to them there's absolutely nothing holding them up and therefore they're going to be in midair when we demonstrate on the blocks it seems pretty obvious what's going to happen the way around this of course is to add support material but we'll add more time and use more plastic so if you can design your part to avoid overhangs it'll be much better tip number three the direction of your lay aligns dictates the strength of the final part is a simple rectangular prism once setting up that other flat down on its side to demonstrate this principle but both print without any issues the difference is going to be in the final part on this closeup we can see exactly where the layer lines are and they're going from left to right in each instance for the version on the left the layer lines are going across the narrowest part of the shape and going across the longest part of the shape on the right let's put our samples in a vise and working with a hammer we can see the one with the layer lines are going long ways it's pretty strong but when we switch around to the other one it breaks almost immediately back to that first one I hit it harder and harder until eventually it fails but that's not from the extrusion snapping but rather the layers coming apart and that's because our extruder plastic is very strong but the weakness is the layer lines coming apart where possible orient your parts to avoid this weakness tip 4 is to pay close attention to your dimensions as you're designing in Tinkercad you can easily find out the dimensions of a part whether it's a single shape like on the left or a compound shape made up of grouped parts if we click on our shape and then click in one of the white corner boxes it'll tell us the dimensions for X&Y and if we click on the fifth box it's located in the center it'll also tell us the height from there if you need to you can make adjustments by either dragging the shape or clicking on the dimension and type in what you want another thing that really catches people out is having features that are too small in your slicing software a typical width of a single extrusion is around half a millimeter although we can see the text in the STL as soon as we press slice we can see some of the text is narrow within that target extrusion and therefore it is ignored by the slicer tip 5 is to be patient and iterate your design I recently designed this touch me mount for the Sidewinder x1 and it had to be very precise in aligning two magnets and that may it took about a dozen goes to get it right you see here I have a shape made up of many sub shapes and you might think if you want to edit their positions you need to click and then ungroup but a shortcut is to simply double click that'll take you inside your grouping where you can make adjustments for instance setting the snapping to a much smaller increment and then using the keyboard to nudge something into place when you're done simply double click elsewhere on the grid and your group will reapply an update if you're designing something tricky that needs to fit a real world object like this clamp I made to go on the front of a go-kart to enable me to wheel it around in car parks easily well here's a great tip for you select your object and then shrink or cut it down to be quite thin it'll now be much quicker to print and you can do a test fit before you commit to the full thing if you've been on the cusp of trying this hopefully these tips can help get you over the line in having a go trust me there's not much more satisfying than identifying a problem in real life heading to your computer drawing something up printing it and coming up with a perfect solution if I've missed any tips please post them in the comments below so your fellow viewers can benefit from them thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 3d printing g'day it's Michael again if you liked the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click Subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 328,733

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printed, 3d printer, 3d print, design, tinkercad, tutorial, lesson, guide, tips, how to, step by step, beginner, slicing, orientation, overhangs, raft, support, stl, export, tinker cad, first cad, beginner friendly

Id: QdvSzXByi_g

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2019