Cool Prints // 3D Printed Compliant Mechanisms

hey everyone welcome to make anything my name is Devin and today on cool prints I wanted to share some of my recent experiments 3d printing compliant mechanisms so how about a quick crash course what is a compliant mechanism well first let's take a look at this ordinary metal clip as you can see this clip is made up of several parts it's got the top and bottom part that are hinged together with a straight steel piece and then there's also a spring that runs through that to give us this clipping mechanism here we have another clip it does the same thing but this one is formed out of a single piece of spring steel that's bent in such a way that it incorporates that spring it's got the handles and it's got the clip on the front very similar but made from one piece and so instead of relying on the interaction of several pieces it relies on the deformation that happens when you apply pressure that's the basic idea behind these compliant mechanisms they are single units that rely on elastic deformation in order to get their mechanical properties even with something as simple as this clip compliant mechanisms are nice because lower part count and lower complexity generally means less problems and lower cost perhaps you've seen a recent video by veritasium where he visits the mechanical engineering department at BYU to learn about what they're doing with these compliant mechanisms and this is one of their more popular parts it's a compliant plier as you can see it's made from a single piece and when I press here it converts this very large and simple motion into a much smaller but much stronger clamping force at this end if I stick my finger in there it doesn't take much pressing to create quite a strong and painful force this is a neat little tool and it's just one of several files that BYU has available on their website for you to download in 3d print yourself if you want to play around with the compliant mechanisms that they came up with now I was learning about these compliant Meccan is pretty much at the same time that I was developing poly panels which are these snap together triangles and well as you can see these have some pretty tough snaps especially these completely solid ones they're meant to be very strong so they need to have strong connections but that means connecting hundreds of these together can really wear down the fingers so I thought why not create a compliant mechanism that I can use to help connect these panels now these pliers are cool because they're designed as basically just a shape that can be cut out of a flat sheet of material you could laser cut a sheet of acrylic and create these pliers but I'm 3d printing and with 3d printing you can create more complex mechanisms so I wanted to take advantage of that so when it came to making a tool to connect these poly panels I was inspired by a household item nail clippers are great because they've got a lot of leverage going for them they've got a pivot all the way at the front here which means that this long handle when you press it down quite easily it creates a very small but strong force here at the front strong enough to clip your nails so I thought I would try to basically replicate this mechanism in order to connect poly panels and doing it as a compliant mechanism so that's how I came up with this this is my poly panel connector tool and as you can see it's basically a giant nail clipper I really didn't have to change too much to make this work it's got this nice long lever it's got the pivot point right here it's got the clamp up here and it's all printed as a single part this came off of my 3d printer looking like this and I think that's pretty cool it's all the way this thing works is you basically set the panels in place line them up and then clip them in and what's awesome here is that this requires very little force and creates the power necessary to clip these things together quite easily now if you're doing 3d connections it does get a little more difficult to hold everything together although it does work and yeah it's a pretty handy little tool this thing works great and even though it looks like a direct copy of this that doesn't mean it was super easy to make I actually have a lot of prototypes by the way these were pretty much all printed using poly alchemy elixir filament that's how they got this cool shine to them but as you can see I started out with a much simpler shape this is just a C style clamp and while this thing does work it still requires basically the same amount of force and that's why I turned to leverage to make it so that you can use much less force to stick together these panels at first I was trying to make these as small as possible but I found that this size works the best in terms of just getting the job done I also played around with the idea of using teeth so that depending on how you align this you could use it to either snap parts together or take them apart but that never really worked and you know taking them apart it's just a matter of tearing them apart so I decided to just focus on the connecting a side of things and that's how I ended up with this guy right here so that was my first foray into compliant mechanisms this little connector tool and I really like the fact that specifically with 3d printing it's not too hard to have parts that pass through each other kind of in the same way that your fingers can pass through each other well so I started making more clips and I came up with some pretty funky ones check out this Cube clip it's basically a perfect cube and it's actually got the handles facing the same way as the clip then I went ahead and rounded it like this and that made it much more flexible so it's interesting how small changes can affect how strong the clamping force is and you know I played around with thickness as well to get different amounts of strength that way I even made some really tiny Clips look at this cute little guy little tiny clip boy it was pretty fun messing around with these and see what kind of different uses I could get by just changing small things for example this version is basically the same thing except I move the handles out to the side like that and now it stands on the table like this and you press it down in order to open the clip or you can press right in the middle like that and by making one that's twice as wide I made this really nice kind of a photo holder or maybe it's for the happy hour menu at your restaurant you know I also made some more standard Clips like these guys we got some interesting figure 8 clips and they work quite well now PLA does deform over time if you were to leave it clipped onto something like that it would probably lose its clamping force rather quickly but you could print this in abs for example and it should be pretty pretty robust and versatile as I was messing around with these clips they kind of led from one idea to the next and I came up with some other ideas that aren't entirely compliant mechanisms but they rely on some of the same principles this is a fun experiment that I came up with these are my upgraded chopsticks they're not quite a compliant mechanism because they do rely on a second part which is this marble but basically when it's in this position this kind of acts like those kiddy chopsticks that you may have seen makes it a little easier to use them there you go some some easy chopsticks but what's interesting is you can slide this marble to the second position up front and now when you press here it basically has a reverse action where pressing it opens the tweezers instead of the other way around and they're just kind of closed by default the only problem here is once you've got something in here if I let go of this the marble can fall out because while the item at the front is basically pulling these apart so for this actually work I'd probably need this marble to be a piece that slides on a track or somehow clipped into here so it won't fall out but still a pretty fun little toy and once again even though it's not entirely a single part mechanism it does rely on the deformation of this 3d printed part in order to get these two actions now my final experiment that was inspired by compliant mechanisms isn't exactly a compliant mechanism itself but I'd seen the guitar Capo's made as compliant mechanisms but I found that those kinds of clamps kind of get weaker over time so I thought maybe I could make a guitar capo in a different way the capo is basically just a part that holds down all the strings to change the tune of the guitar so what I came up with was this print that uses elastic filament this is ninjaflex and it's combined with a PE TG part that feeds through the flexible bit and allows you to kind of have this zip-tie type mechanism to clamp it on to the guitar [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that's still a work in progress I'm not sure it's actually better than the traditional capo because it does require you to feed that elastic strap in and out it's not super easy to use but in terms of a 3d printed capo it's among the better ones I've used still something I'm working on alright so there you have it that's pretty much where my experimentation with compliant mechanisms took me in the past one or two weeks I hope you thought it was interesting and maybe it even gave you some ideas if you want to print any of these out and try them for yourselves go ahead and check out the links in the description where I have all these files available for you to download at my mini Factory and I'll also link to the other files that BYU has available for 3d printing and also that veritasium video on compliant mechanisms which was really fascinating as well anyways that's it for this week's video I hope you enjoyed it I hope I'll see you in the next one but until then I'm Devon this is make anything and as always stay inspired well which is happy [Music] you

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 1,259,896

Rating: 4.8563151 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, functional prints, functional 3D prints, compliant mechanisms, 3D printed compliant mechanisms, cool 3D prints, cool 3D printed things, 3D printed chopsticks, 3d print, 3d printed, 3D prints, 3d prints, compliant machines, flexible 3D prints, flexible filament, 3D printed guitar capo, 3D printed capo, complient mechanism, complient mechanisms

Id: PgDJlLqeTdo

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 11 2019