FreeCad Tutorial #6 | EASY way to Model a KNURLED Surface for 3D Printing in FreeCAD

hello and welcome back to k-tec designs my name is seth in this tutorial i'll show you a quick way to make a perfect knurl on a round surface [Music] this can be pretty useful if you're making a removable cap or let's say a lens cover or even if you wanted to make something smaller like a thumb screw you can use this method for all of those and you'll have a easy to print and effective knurled shape if you're new to freecad as always let's start our model on the start page create new let's change our workbench to part design let's create a body and a sketch we're going to sketch on the yz plane sorry xz plane click ok uh the shape we're going to make is going to be a simple cap i'm not going to bother with modeling in any threads or any kind of lip for attachment uh this is a non-functional cap it's just meant to demonstrate the modeling of the knurl let's go up to create a poly line i guess i'll start like this you'll notice that my sketch colors are different from the standard and that's because i've been doing a lot of customization to make the experience a little bit closer to solidworks i may do a quick video on all of the settings that i have currently with those two points selected let's join those and then i like to make some symmetrical mirror points here let's go to the outside so that i can dimension on the diameter of the part since i know i'm doing a revolved part i wanted to mention on the diameter so let's make that dang it did that wrong click both of those okay i would do 50 millimeters which is about two two inches in diameter the wall thickness i'm making 3.5 millimeters completely arbitrary and this one also 3.5 millimeters i'll just make those equal and then the overall height is 20. so you'll see everything is black now meaning that it's fully defined and that's how solidworks handles it like i said i'm a long time solidworks user so this just makes the experience similar i also changed all of the constraints to green i know solidworks actually has them as black with a green background but we don't have that option here so green it is all right let's close that sketch uh let's find where the revolve is the default there is good you don't have to select this but it's fine click ok i'm going to grab this edge and i'm going to make a chamfer of 2 3 millimeters all right the next step is to model the cut out for our neural this is technically a recessed neural you can have a recess neural which is this the kind that we're going to model here or you can have a raised knurl this modeling method can handle both of those you just change it for this recess neural we're going to use a cut feature but if you're going to make a raised just uh use a positive feature so let's grab a new sketch on the x y plane i'm going to hide that body there let's take uh yeah we'll make a construction line here and i'll make a construction circle so it should be coincident we know the diameter is 50 millimeters so that's the value of the circle here and those did not join so it's wrong one join those uh let's make this 45 and then we're going to need to model a square oh that's right i decided to model in the lower eighth because that makes modeling the square easy um i won't have to make some kind of triangle or a diamond shape over here or whatever this is uh easy easy to use so make those coincident now we're going to make this about a millimeter we don't need a very large knurl but you could make you can make this whatever you want another way to do it uh probably a more accurate way to do it let's just make that driven is to dimension from here to here make that let's say 0.8 because that's your actual neural depth let us close that sketch because that's all done actually just realize that that was not fully constrained that's because it's not square oh that's interesting the end points are fully constrained but the huh i modeled this as construction geometry okay oops take that back all right now we can see it okay now that we have that our sketch we're gonna make our helical cut we're gonna revolve it around this axis these are all correct we're going to go based on height and turns the height of this part is 20 millimeters so you can see i've got one two or one two three turns uh that's too many we want our knurl to angle out at about 30 degrees i've just kind of been eyeballing it um you type in point one that gives a pretty good result all right click ok next we're going to reuse this sketch and we're going to do the same exact feature but we're going to go in the opposite direction click ok on that now the final step is to take both of these and create a polar pattern uh that axis all right so i've calculated that based on the the width the arc length of the knurl i can fit about 55 occurrences in here so i'm going to type in 55 and it could take a while for your computer to calculate this i'm not sure what's going on in the background code that makes this take so long but let's type in 55 and we're gonna watch it think for maybe three minutes all right wow there we go so that was like five minutes um but there you see we've got a perfect knurl click ok and that's it that's all there's there is to it you can see the model spins fairly easily now maybe developers if someone knows a developer and can ask them why that's taking so long to model um be nice to know or if you guys in the comments know why it takes so long to uh calculate that let me know uh but other than that thanks for watching hopefully this was a useful tutorial for you um i'll show you the printed part after this and uh please like the video please subscribe if you'd like to see more tutorials of this kind and again thanks for watching bye [Music] you

Channel: KTEC DESIGNS

Views: 13,137

Keywords: FreeCAD, 3D Printing, tutorial

Id: UFnFFVXltN0

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022