How to model threads in SolidWorks for 3D Printing (Full Tutorial)

[Music] hi I'm Connor from Connor data engineer and today I'm going to go on through how to draw threads for 3d printing in SolidWorks so we can see their finished models here so we have body and the cap so you can see the threads on the cap and the design and the knurling and stuff I just a my my name my initials on it there as well and you can see the threads on the inside of the the body and these two pieces screwed together then hormonal box so that's the finish piece there together and you can see their trades are nice and they fit well together Freddie well so I'm going to be going through how to do this in SolidWorks and importer of the different tolerances and stuff so we go all the walks down and step through that okay so i've opened a new part here in SolidWorks and the first part that we wanna draw is the main body of the box that the capital trade into and then we'll move on to the cap obviously if you don't want to design your own part in SolidWorks all the files are available on Thingiverse for you to download and print on your own printer but it's kind of good to understand the design of something like this so that you can go on put your own threads and your own objects and of your own kind of design freedom of your projects and so we're open a new sketch here on the top plane and I want to create a circular box that's 15 million diameter these sizes are just kind of sizes that I pick to create a print that wouldn't take too long to print the print takes about three hours in toll on my NSA's printer but I'll talk about that more later on so we're gonna extrude up this to create a cylinder that's 50 mil height so now we have the kind of main shape of the body created so I want to shell this so that we have a hollow inside and I want the diameter to be formula just picked us off pop top surface because if you don't think surface it'll just shell the inside and we want an open top so now you can see that we have the inside is hollow and we have the top section here and so I'm just gonna put some Phillips on this now I'm gonna put a 5min first in the bottom and of the internal and the external site it's just to make it look a bit nicer got a two mil first on the inside and a one the first on the outside I could have put a tumour ferret on both sides but I wants to have a talk a flash top surface for the cap to meet the body and I'll talk a bit more about that later on so this is the shape of your main body piece so we need to draw the cap next and then cut out the shape of the cap of trades into the body so that you may have matching threads with the treads on the cap but it's easier to draw the external thread stand train draw the internal threads in here so once that mixed okay so i've created another new part in SolidWorks and so we're gonna create another sketch on the top plane here again I'm gonna draw a circle diameter 40 points sorry 14 days just to explain where this measurement came from if we look back at our main body you can see the internal diameter of this is 42 mu so why I picked four 2.8 is I wanted to have a point zero point six mil gap the whole way around between the cap and the body just to make sure there was good clearance because I wanted the good contact between the treads and I didn't want the cap on the body to be interfering with each other without the trades so if you take point six million 42 you get 40 point 8 that's where that measure and measurement is coming from so if we extrude this off 15 mil so the treads are going to be between here and here in this 15-minute section so this means that the cap is going to go into the body 15 mil and that gives you a good amount of space to push I go through revivals of threads on us so now we're going to create the section for you to holds the cap in your hand so we create another circle on top of this and the diameter of this circle needs to match the external diameter of the body so that was 15 minutes and we're going to extrude this off 20 mil so between here and here is where you're gonna hold the parrot in your hand so this kind of gives you a good amount of space to hold the cap in Europe between your fingers without using too much space so the next thing we need to do is put some Philips on it just to make it to smooth it out and make it easy to hold and to make put a nice feel out so I'm going to know first between the upper and the lower part so if you remember from the body we post a tune in for this here so that will match that so the other Philips I'm gonna put on us are known for this on the top to Memphis on the bottom and on Memphis on the final inch um I could use a larger for this here but again I want a flat surface to meet a flat surface between cap on the body so this is our main body our cap shape so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to put some grip on the around the site so if you look down at the top of the part I'm gonna draw a new sketch on the top of the part center line from the origin to the outer circle and start drawing the shape of the grip we're gonna just come out a bit larger just to get those those pieces to line up so and we want the midpoint of this to my nope at this point coincident I'm gonna draw a construction circle our construction point just because I wanted to explain now we need some guidance I'm going to know these measurements I worked out from just playing around with the different sizes and how it looked and these were kind of good measurements that I felt for my size a box if you draw a different size the dude measurements will have to be different but just play around with the different measurements it's the same with the Phillips you just kind of play around with it until you get a good a good look and something that you think will feel good for the user so we're gonna try draw a spline between these three points just like that escaped it exists and then you have your kind of course shape so I'm gonna cut this the whole way through the part so now you can kind of see what I'm starting to go for so now I want to put a Philips all around this to kind of smooth it out and get rid of the sharp edges now instead of me having to draw all of these parts are all of these cuts I'm just going to draw it once and do it in a circular pattern around the center but this I need to draw an axis for this work so because I started this drawing over the origin in the middle of us you can just break the front plane and the right plane to draw your axis and that would give you an axis through the middle of your part this is why it's very important to pick where you put your origin at starting your drawing so now I want to create a circular pattern around this axis and the features I want from the top um so yeah I've drawn this before so this is where the settings are saved you need to have equal spacing and around 360 degrees and then you kind of just pick a number of grips that look good on your your part so I picked 16 except that you can see I have my grips all the way around my parish no I'm gonna hide this axis I'm just usually do that I hide Max's and we plant my reference planes I'm finished with them I just so I can always see what's going on with the parrot so the next thing we need to move on to is the shredding of the cap okay so we're going to start drawing our threads on this parent now so I'm going to open a sketch on the front plane of this part and I'm gonna go perpendicular to that if you're wondering how I'm getting this menu upon dispersing space and I've been up the orientation menu and you can change what our annotations are looking at but normal to would be normal to the plane that you're working on so I'm gonna start by drawing a line over here it's vertical and I want to add a relationship to this line so I want this line to be calling your wish this outside length so they if they were to continue on they would pass each other at me and be on the same length so now I'm start to dimension this so I want this line to be 15.2 men above the base of this this is because from here to here is 15 mil and I want this to start one layer above this which is zero point two all my layers on my printer zero point two mil and this line is going to be two okay so now I need to draw a center line it starts at the midpoint of this line and comes out horizontally for our two points and now I want the line now at the top of that center line for afternoon and when you on the screen this this now engineer this so the entity is Sameer is this line and this line I want to premiere the moon both got center line and that wouldn't just match it it just saves me able to draw the other side of this um so you may be wondering what this shape is and how the how the dimensions were got so this is 2.2 mil because if you take away 0.6 which if you remember in a gap that gives you one point six mil so that means it will one point six million to the part for 3d printing on my printer all key dimensions have to be done in multiples of 0.4 so that means you get four steps on that which means it will be kind of a strong piece and that'll be what be inside the body of the piece so I just thought that would be a good size this is one mil and this is to milled so you just you get this sloping trapezoid shape all trades are kind of done in trapezoids or triangles more prominently trapezoids because it's a stronger trade so that's your profile of your trade and the reasons why it was done so now we need to draw a plane so I'm gonna exit from this sketch because I'm not ready to use this sketch but I need us for the next step just draw a plane and our reference plane so I need a plane to be parallel to either the top surface or any any horizontal surface in the part so parallel and my second reference is going to be the midpoint on this line and that needs to be coincident to that so this is a reference plane you can draw on reference planes because you have to draw on a plane you can't just draw on me there so I'm going to open a sketch on top of this and I want to go a normal to this plane doesn't matter what way has turned as long as we can see the sketch and the origin so Aang's draw a circle in this plane that will match up with the external diameter are the external point on that sketch so we're just going to dimension this just to make sure that's correct it should be 40.8 no it should match our external external diameter of this so now we're going to use this circle to create a helix which is kind of like a spiral to go spiral down along this and then we're gonna sweep this profile along the spiral sweep basically means you drag a profile along a line and it creates a solid body doing that so you need to go into carves helix in spiral and now we need to put in our settings so the thread will follow this line so I'm gonna use height and revolution because it's the easiest way to figure out what I'm going to do with your with your traits because people pages is kind of painful so I'm gonna go for 13 mil and 3 revolutions so 3 revolutions kind of gives you a good bit of space between your trades which gives a good strength to the part you're not taking out too much material over the other part where ever 13 move from is you can see the arch there and it's it down here so if you come down 13 mil you guess there's enough space here for the the profiles come down so you just kind of need to play around with this when you're drawing this you need to make sure that your start angle matches up with the profile of your sketch otherwise it won't work because your profile has to be at the start of your spire at your helix you'll also need to make sure this is his counterclockwise helix when I first drew this I clicked a he'd a clockwise helix and I printed it out and everything but the trade was backwards so it was opposite to the conventional way to turn the thread to turn a cap which was kind of annoying when it is it's kind of a learning lesson so make sure that's counterclockwise that's very important okay so you can see now that we have our profile and we have our helix spiral so now we need to do a sweep sweep boss/base so we select our profile which is the sketch and then we select our helix and you can see that it is created the trait except that so you can see that the trade comes down out of the cap and finishes down here just what we want we're gonna hide the helix again just for ease of use I'm gonna hide my reference plane okay okay so now we just want to do some sham freeing just to make sure that this parrot is cruising easily so I'm going to open up sham for here and then come around me at the end of my part and I'm going to do an 11 mil a 10 degree sham for this shape on this surface I'm just flip the direction and that'll just make it easier to put the trade into the into the body again you can work out these kind of settings just by playing it around and playing around with the settings so now I need another sham for these two edges I'm going to go with a 1 middle 45 degree chamfer this gives us this nice clean shape but that'll be very easy to screw in and now I need to fill it this edge because these this is too sharp of an edge for 3d printing so I'm gonna put a windmill on the sage and that gives us a very good and very good shape for putting in the threat of further further it kind of suits the 3d printer as well so finally to just finish up this trailer I'm just gonna put a zero point 2 mil finish on both the top edge and the bottom edge of these trays you're very rarely see it's red with a very sharp angel like that in fact most products will not sharp edges like this so this is our cap piece finished so the next stage of this design process is to cut the threads out of this piece out of this body however if we were to just cut this out of the other piece and it has been exact match and invasion cell works put it on the printers there's no way to possibly fit together so what we're gonna do is we're gonna offset this trade by a set amount and cut that out of the body just to give a good gap let's do that next okay so what I've done here is I've used save as create a new pair called cap combine which is the see it's essentially a copy of our cap design that we've just finished so the first thing we're going to do is we are going to delete the Phillips and champers that we added to the trades to make them and now we're going to edit the profile that we used for the sweep of the trade so we're just gonna come normal to that so the first thing I want to do is I'm going to make the the lines of the profile for construction so what this means is that SolidWorks will ignore these lines and because you only using them to create the lines you extra want to use in the drawing so now that that's done we're going to offset these lines by 20mm are sorry by 0.2 mil and so what this is gonna do is this is going to create the tolerance between the the trade and the body so I tried a few different test prints and 0.2 gave a tight fitting trade that worked well I know I said you have to work in zero point force but I tried this and it worked really well it just when the print comes off the printer first you have to walk it through a few times to get the trade to work properly but after that the trade is perfect and I've had the current version of that I'm using for a while now and been playing with and it's perfectly fine so now that we have that done we're gonna exit the sketch and that will have created a larger trade so the other thing that we're gonna do interaction when I edit the helix and spiral that we created for the treads so I'm gonna change this to pitch and revolution so SolidWorks has automatically worked out from the height that we've unit before the pitch of the tread whereas initially it's very difficult to route the page so what we are gonna do is I want to extend on this this helix by half a revolution what this does is it gives the tread a bit of play so that a few over tightness the tread won't get jammed in against the edge at the end of the trades and get stock that happen to one of the previous models I have and so this this gives it a huge amount of space to tighten down and it won't get stuck we just finished that and this is now the part that we're going to use to combine with the main body to create the straight okay so I've reopened my main body here and we can finish the design of this patch by calling out the the cap that we made to go over this part and that'll be that'll finish up the design for this what we need to do is come to insert insert part so cap combined and that will bring this part into the main body it doesn't create an assembly it just kind of inserts another body into this part and the important thing to note here is that you need to make sure that you've selected located part with new copy feature what this although this will allow you to make this part to this part after it's been inserted into the into the actual part itself so we're just gonna click to drop this in here and now it's opened up the locate located part dialog here so we're going to add some mates to this dispatch to make this to this so the first thing that we're going to do is we want to just to help line up the part is we want to make this end surface of the threads to the front plane of this part and we're gonna add that don't click tick because we're make sure you just click edge because that would close the located parts menu and I'm not ready for that yes so the next mate we need to do is we need to make the surface of this cap this part here to the internal surface of this concentric are concentric Li so that they're in line with each other and that now we need to meet at the top of the flat top surface of the body which one of these flats offices on the cap and now you can see that the cap and the body should be lined up properly we can close this and now we have the body and the cap with the offset trains pulling so now we're going to do a combine to cut this parent this body out of this body so to insert features combine and we're going to do is subtract so the main body is the part that you want to leave behind afterwards or in Kota so that's this part here and the body to subtract is this part here so you can see that's going to cook the traits of the main body okay here and now you can see that we have the treads caught into the body of the piece so that's this parrot finished now okay so I've just made an assembly here of the cap the actual captain of the offside cap and the body just so we can sanity check for design so I performed the same mates that we did with the combined cap and the body previously was instead of combined instead of amazing the end of the treads with the front plane I've made at the two front planes of this part and this part so we're just gonna do a section here across the front plane okay so we can see the treads here that there is a decent gap between the actual trades and the body and none of them are touching and that that looks like it should work properly it's just it's important to check that your treads actually mesh especially when you want to 3d print them but they have to actually work so this design should be ready for printing now okay so I saved the cap and the body as sel in SolidWorks it's simple to save as STL and I've imported them into my slicer here I'm using the cure slicer in octoprint because octagons values manage my 3d printer so when you import them they'll probably be in the wrong orientation so you just need to orientate them properly the cap we're gonna print upside down just because their detail on the bottom of this what I did after you left it sure was I added just my initials to the model and I'm just going to line them up where stuff on my bed and that should be ready to go I've this is just a poll file that my printer just so quick over you I use 200-degree nozzle heads 50 degree bait there 0.2 layer heights fill density is 20 I kind of want this to be a strong part normally I'd use less than that at one point two shell thickness 30 millimeters per second print speed that's mainly it and then you can slice out the parts thing okay so I'm just gonna play a time-lapse here so my printer produces the time-lapse because I have a webcam to monitor their print as it prints the file so I'm gonna just watch through the time-lapse here you can see the cap is on this side and the main body is on the other side you'll start to see the threads coming up on the cap there no we're good on this side the printer is a Annie in it aah it was about 200 euro including shipping and from st. Mark's put a link in the description if you'd like to have a look at the printer that's a fairly good printer but it takes a good while to get it set up and configure to work properly but it's well worth it it's a good it's a good cheap printer and good kid printer in my opinion you can you can definitely see the threads at this point so it's finished printing the cap and I just know we're printing the body this print took about three hours to finish on my printer okay so this is my printer I just started throwing some quick footage of us so here is the heart ends and my heat beds this is the webcam that I use for my time lapses and for monitoring prints remotely I have some tools held up at the sides there's the controller and the screen the whole thing is controlled by a Raspberry Pi you don't slide there I just saw blue tape on the bed for adhesion okay so at the end of all that we are finding a finished piece and so with the two parts and the trades when you first take it off the printer you'll have to ruin the threads into the parents and like I would sometimes just to break off any loose pieces any suare for stray bits filaments and get them in fission well but as you can see it goes in and out very well and it's very easy to use so there's kind of inside kind of cleaned it off of this yeah so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial let me know what you think of it if you want me to do more let me know I'm used to raising more kind of blog style tutorials but if you like this I can give this a go more and so yeah there's tons of articles and blogs available on Connor dad engineer lots of different 3d printing and electronics projects so thanks for making it through this video and hopefully we'll see your own again yeah you

Channel: Conor Walsh

Views: 113,407

Keywords: threads, solidworks, 3D Printing, Anet A8, CAD, Modelling, Thingiverse, Sainsmart

Id: 0JLj7N8fbdQ

Length: 32min 18sec (1938 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018