How to design 3D Printable Hinges - Make moving parts!

in this video we are going to talk about how you can 3d print hinges that's right the video all about hinges first Kickstarter so I posted up on Twitter what sort of video I should do now I have fast it's not showing to a stream or a tutorial and the overwhelming vote was for a tutorial which is awesome so something I think to give out for some time is 3d printing being a unique technology that it is allows you to do really interesting geometries that you can't really do it any other manufacturing process but because of this does a lot of learnings that you need to do when it comes to designing for 3d printing now sometimes you'll need to make parts that move that I guess hinge and there's actually quite a few techniques you can take from the injection molding world and apply them to your 3d printable designs to make hinges that press in place or have other properties so in this video I want to go through five hinges that I've personally used and tested with 3d printing and I know that work well you can apply them to your own design so one of the coolest things you can do with 3d printing is print in place designs with multiple moving parts that actually form one cohesive 3d print and can't really be separated once the print complete so we're going to start with this which is what I like to call a pin hinge so I don't know again if these have these are the correct names for these type of hinges but I'm just going to go through what I know so this hinge is pretty simple and I've designed all of these in fusion 360 which you can have a look at after the video but basically a pin hinge has a hollow in one part and a pen running through the center of the other part and these have a certain distance separation depending on your printer it is a bridge across that gap so you may need to increase or decrease that separation distance but for me I did point three millimeters and it actually works really really quite well so you end up with a hinge that is completely locked together so this kind of hinge is fantastic for articulated design where you want something to be able to move but not separate and there's actually very little plate in terms of portion on this prove because I've got such a small tolerance so it's actually quite accurate and you can can get some really cool-looking prints you can even do tank trap and that kind of thing using this kind of hinge but keep in mind again your breaching capabilities of your printer needs to be pretty good to pull this loot inch off and the next kind of hinge is this one which has little bumps or nubs locking the two parts together it's a variation on a pin hinge but instead of having a pin all the way through it has these little circular nub that interlock together so you'll often see this kind of hinge in injection model boxes but they use a sort of strongest different plastic like an acrylic that kind of thing so you have nice optical clarity but they can't do these hinges in one place honestly injection modeling they have to snap them together afterwards which means that you can print in place these hinges on your 3d printer but it also means if you design them carefully with a bit of room for materials or flex they can snap apart so you can design them in one piece print in place or you can design them to snap together so these are really really handy because they prints with no support no issues and you can easily make parts that snap together to each other by using this kind of design and again it's just to very small spheres the smaller are tolerances again I think I did point two millimeters maybe or this one depending on your printer you may need to increase or decrease that but if you allow the plastic to deform you can release them which is really handy to need separate parts and then bring them back together afterwards and again this is in contrast with a pin style hinge which is completely locked this is there's no errors ever coming apart but were these these little nubs you can separate them and the next kind of hinge is known as a living hinge so this is a really interesting type of hinge that takes advantage of certain properties of certain types of plastics and it's extremely common in injection molding so any low cost plastic container with a lid that opens up as part of the same material look at it closely and you'll notice that there's a very thin surface of plastic joining the two parts that allows it to fold into place as that plastic deforms so as you can imagine this is very material pendants so with 3d printing it's very much an advanced technique I would say this very small example is put it in nylon so the nylon as you can see folds nicely with that very thin gap but as it reaches the 45 degree chamfer of this part very good thicker it can fold and more so you can do boxes that falls together if you're using a flexible material but obviously this is not going to work with most pas unless they're modified be flexible and even abs will struggle and even in injection molding you only get a certain number of Bend before this type of hinge fatigues and breaks so it's often used as I said for cheap things where you only need maybe a few hundred oh things and closings before that product is thrown away and the next type of change is a variation on a living hinge as I've shown you before if the plastic has room to deform you can use that as a lever or kind of pin so what I have here is a clasp so basically this has a part here with a little cutout and this slides into place and the clasp will lock into that gap now this is the best design I could refine this but it does depend on that plastic being very thin to create a lever to sort of fold from I suppose to your openers and closing in place and with it all in place it locks that little rod into place then you can lift it up by pushing that button and because the plastic can be formed slightly it allows you to release that part so you've often seen this kind of design for backpack backpack clips use almost an identical style of release mechanism to insert a clasp and then release it and there's nothing stopping you from using this in your 3d printing and as I said you can do it on stiffer plastics such as this PLA and abs would also work also the PCG would be quite suitable but for the living style hinges where it flexes almost 180 degrees you definitely need a more flexible material for that and these final style of hinge would be to use a fastener yes I know it's cheating but it in some cases you have to have a very strong long wearing long duty hinge that has some strength to it then you kind of can't get away from using fasteners and it's nothing all that just design enough tolerance for that fastener to go in and use a nut on the other side I recommend using a nylock nut if you can or you can even tap it into plastic by making the receiving end of that hinge tighter and then threading a thread into it so for example on m3 you'd make that hole 2.5 millimeters and then tap it with an m3 or even force the screw in if you like and that's going to make give you a very very heavy-duty hinge much heavier duty than all these printed placed ones but at the expense of having to add fasteners and additional hardware to your print so thanks for watching guys hope you found this video useful a different types of hinges I'm going to put the STL files up on patreon I'm going to link below to the fusion 360 source files if you want to take my example and then use them for your own projects and I'd love to see your your results on using printing place hinges in your designs to absolutely hit me up on social media guys I am at makers muse on Twitter and Instagram I'd love to see your results and of course if you enjoyed watching this video on mega season we'll see features 3d print tips tricks and reviews hit subscribe button to get a massive amount and I look forward seeing again very shortly happy printing guys see you later the equator this place satellite

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Views: 963,534

Rating: 4.8707466 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, printing, hinges, moving parts, moving 3D print, how to, fusion 360, types, 3D Printable hinges, print in place, 3D Printer, makersmuse, maker's muse, tutorial, guide, CAD, design, angus deveson, australia, PLA, Nylon, living hinge, bridge, tolerance

Id: 7JhjhgjchfM

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017