Joining 3D prints with annular joints designed in Fusion 360

more advanced 3d prints often consist of multiple parts here we'll design a quick and simple analogy to connect such parts we'll do this for a simple enclosure puff cylinder and box shape let's start by creating a new design in fusion 360 to create the cylinder we'll first construct a new component our cylinder is going to be comprised of a circle base so let's create that at the origin with a diameter of 40 millimeters let's finish it sketch well extrude it up 40 millimeters and create a shell of 1 millimeter on the inside there will be a top and a bottom part to this so we'll slice this object in two parts first we'll create a mid plane between the top and the bottom and we'll use that mid plane to slice the body in half and now we will have a bottom and a top part our joint is gonna be made out of a profile which will will revolve around our sketch should be on this edge in order to do that first create an axis through the cylinder and then create a plane through this axis so now we can create a sketch on this plane our profile will start out in the bottom component and we'll leave a little bit of space between the top part and our joint we'll do this because this will be our top part and if you would have to line all the way over here the profile over here there would be very little room between the two parts and the fit might be too tight so we'll go out and go up a bit say 1.5 millimeters then we'll go in in and this is the part where we actually cut into the top part it only has to be like tiny bits at one point 0.1 millimeter will be just fine got a bit of room there we'll go to the top go back now we could just go up and then finish off our part but I found it's better to have a little bit of an angle here say something around this this will help align our part our two parts together and let's make it a lot easier to snap them together from there we can just loop back somewhere over there to our base and let's keep a little bit of an slope here so I have some extra rigidity and that's our main shape or round off some of these edges all right and let's do some more Philips over there and these two especially this one will take most of the load so Oh get a nice curve over there and this should do let's inspect and see that this is proper thickness that seems good so let's finish this sketch and go back to our shaded view visual styles shaded with visible edges but we'll do now is revolve this profile around so we'll go to revolve select our profile and revolve it around our cylinder and we'll join it to the bottom part our top part does not yet have the little cutout in order to do that we'll select our top parts combined then we'll select as a tool or bottom part and we'll cut cut out the bottom part from the top parts and we want to keep our bottom part so have keep tools selected press ok and now you'll see that we'll have a little cutout in our top part so that's all for this little test shape we can send it to the printer by going to bottom save as SEL save just yell ok and top save this TL ok I'm using the preusse printer so I'm gonna be used to prove the slicer to impart ICO files and we'll distribute them off the build plate to print ease found out that a quality of 15 millimeter layer height works well without brim and go into slicing and you might be able to make out that there are small cards in our top part and indeed there's a small protrusion in our bottom part so let's go ahead and print these here you can see the resulting print they came out pretty well there's a bit of a rough edge to them the two halves they line up nicely and they snap together with just a bit of force and it's pretty simple to pop them loose as well to quite a few iterations to get to this design one of the problems is that parts wouldn't align properly because there was no inward bent to help along so these two parts simply didn't want to join one thing that did work was not having this protruding edge simply having a flat edge was enough to have a pretty tight friction connection between the two parts now let's look at how we can design the box enclosure starting out in fusion 360 with a new design we'll create a new component for this box we'll start out with a rectangle centered at the origin of 40 by 40 millimeters let's extrude this up 40 millimeters and will shell it out one millimeter let's get the whole part body with one millimeter to create a top and a bottom part I'll create a midline and we'll split this body using that mid plane what we'll be doing is drawing a profile and sweeping it around this inner edge will draw the profile on a mid plane between the back and the front and a back edge so in wireframe we'll start out in the bottom part we've a bit of a gap again between the top part and our joint because it's already gonna be a really snug fit from here we'll go up a decent amount go to the top part and create a small little connection notice that it's not actually touching and all this touching it's not actually cutting into the top part that's because because of the rectangular shape and there isn't much room for the joint to Bend so any cutouts or protrusion would we limit connecting to two joints together again to ease with alignment will create a bend and we'll go this way and ease into the bottom part so that's our main outline let's round off some of these edges in particular this hat is gonna take a lot of strain and we'll round off these edges tiny bit as well so if we finish this sketch and go back into shaded mode we'll sweep around this part or this profile to create our joints for that we'll select our profile and our path which will be the inner edge here so holding command key I'm gonna select all the edges and we'll join it to the bottom part and that's it now the bottom part will fit into the top part and because there's no cutouts we don't have to do a combined bodies to print it we'll save it as an STL and then the top part will open our STL files in our slicer I'm using a proves a printer so I'll have approved slicer I'll distribute the parts of the build plate and I'll slice it at 0.5 millimeter layer Heights and check that our ads is coming true and as you can see there is a slight protrusion here so it seems good let's send it to the printer so I printed these parts using PLA and the results are pretty good the parts hold together pretty well and you can easily get them apart and it's not too hard to snap them together again but of course I ran into some issues the most prominent being that this joined for a rectangular shape is much more sensitive to having the right dimensions this part wouldn't fit together because the protrusion was too large and the wall was too thick so I had to send it off and even then the parts didn't fit together well another problem was aligning two parts together this part was missing the inward Bend so they wouldn't align properly and again I found that not having a protrusion and cutouts at all also worked for this part if you make joint long enough you have enough friction to keep the parts together I'm not sure if you can call this an annular joint for this rectangle shape I think it needs to be circle for that but it works and it's a decent connection between two parts if you're trying it out yourself I suggest you try it out without protrusion first and if you need more holding power do a protrusion and cut out if you enjoyed this video please leave a like if you didn't enjoy it please let me know in the comment what I can improve for the next time

Channel: DreamOnward

Views: 18,290

Keywords: 3D printing, CAD, Fusion 360

Id: SvI8qrdAr1w

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020