Level Up Your 3D Prints with Hidden Magnets! | How To 3D Print Magnets In Your Designs

hello everyone and welcome back to an exciting 3D printing tutorial today I'm going to show you how to embed magnets into your 3D printing but I'm going to take it a Step Beyond that and show you how to completely cover those magnets using 3D printing as well it's a really cool technique that advances your 3D printing and it's great for things like jewelry boxes or fridge magnets all sorts of things so follow along with this tutorial I'll show you my process and then you can see what creative projects you can make from it all right let's get into it to begin this project we'll need a marker and magnets the magnets I'm using are 6x2 mm so the point of the marker is to put a dot on the magnets which will indicate the polarity of the magnet now you can't just use any marker as you can see here this one rubs off too easy so you need to use a permanent marker next we'll go into Fusion 360 and make our tolerance test model so the first thing you're going to need to do is set up a tolerance test model what I've done is used Fusion to create this model and it's just a simple model to create a few different holes and test the tolerance of each one so to explain I'm going to go back a bit to the original sketch and unhide it so I've just built a little sketch like this and the magnets that I'm using uh 6 M by 2 m so 6 M diameter by 2 m height whenever you do a tolerance you probably want to start in .1 increments so here I've done three circles one is at 6.1 one is at 6.2 one is at 6.3 this way I can put a magnet in each one and just see which fits best so I've done a quick little sketch like that I've then extruded it I've only extruded it a little bit cuz I want this to be a pretty quick print so I've just extruded it 3 mil the next stage is I've used the first sketch to cut and I have made a cut of -2.4 mm so the magnet does only have a height of 2 mm but just with the nature of 3D printing you want a bit of space there just in case you don't want it to the tool head to be uh scratching over the magnet if it's you know sticking out too much so you want it to sit down a little bit but obviously not too far otherwise it's not going to be strong enough for the magnets to attract to each other so I recommend either 4 or5 in this case I've done 2.4 mm for a cut then I've just extruded A5 uh wall on the top so when you do your printing over the top of the magnet I recommend at least two layers so if you're printing at 22 mm you'd want 4 space in this case I've just G .5 again you don't want 1 mil thickness or 2 mil thickness because then you'll also have the other side of if you're going to have two of these printed and if you had 2 mil height and 2 mil height then you got four Ms between and the magnets are not going to attract very well the next thing I did was just create a sketch on top just uh some text and then I extruded that text so I could easily identify which magnet was which tolerance so there's 0.1 there's Point 2 there's 3 next thing we do is we send it over to the print so we go file 3D print we select our component and and click okay now I have set this up as custom so it goes into bamboo Studio directly and here it is so we've got bamboo Studio open we've got our component in here and I'm just going to slice this so you can see what's happening so we got it set to2 layer height I'm going to slice the plate and I'm just going to drop down through the layers here so using the up and down keys on the keyboard is an easy way of dropping through the layers so you can see as this prints it's going up it's making the whole for the magnets and then right here is the final layer where you want to drop the magnets in and then the next layer it starts printing over the top and then the final layer is one more layer over the top so how do we get it to stop so we can put our magnets inside well first you need to slice the plate then you need to scroll down or up and down until you find the layer where it transitions between the final layer and the next layer where it actually goes at the top so you want to go one back and then you right click over on this plus button and you can add a pause so what that is doing is it's going to add some G-Code where it pauses the print it will send the tool head or the print head to the back corner so you have some room to work on it and then you can drop your magnets in because this is a pretty small print and I don't want it to be coming off I also want to just add a brim to it so I might go back to prepare and I always forget where it is so I'll go to Global and just search for brim brim type and it's highlighting it for me so I want to set that to out to brim and then just slice plate again so that's all done now it's got a brim on it uh it pauses here and then it continues also one more thing I need to do we need to make a second one of these so it can magnetize together so we can clone it so we're just going to clone this one once auto arrange all righty and I'll probably want to put a little bit of spacing between these as well and then we're going to also move it towards the front of the build plate as this is just going to make it a little easier to access if it was right at the back and it's pausing and trying to put the magnet in it's quite difficult so bring it to the front as much as you can slice plate one more time and this would be ready to go it's going to pause at that point we can drop our magnets in make sure they fit see what the best tolerance is and then resume and it'll do those final two layers so we can print plate we'll send that over and we'll see how it goes okay so our print has hit our pause point in the G-Code and it's time to put our magnets in we need to make sure the polarity is the right way so this is why we've marked it and I can put in one of the magnets because this is a test one I'm trying the 6.1 diameter and it was too difficult so I went straight to the 6.2 which needed a little more pressure but I was still able to push it in and then the 6.3 mm that just dropped in but there was really nothing hold it in place and same for the other side I put in I went straight to the 6.2 mm and pushed that in and then to the 6.3 keep in mind that I had to reverse which way the magnets were facing because when the two parts brought together they need to attract each other once the magnets are in place we hit resume and the nozzle will start heating back up once it's to the correct temperature you'll notice it starts moving again and you'll notice straight away we've got an issue so I quickly stop and let's take a look at that again so what happened here is that the magnets are attracted to the hot end and it's kind of skipped over the top and ended up moving over to the other magnet so that's where I had to St the print and we can see that we're going to have to try something else taking a closer look we can see the three holes so the 6.1 I couldn't fit it in 6.2 I could and then the 6.3 was the one where the magnets jumped out and you got to be careful with these little buggers they flick around quite a bit so here we can see the 6.2 mm it's pressed in they're not coming out because the tolerance is really tight but those 6.3 mm it's just not tight enough and so the magnet is just dropping out when the U print head goes over the top it just lifts it out and then ends up getting stuck to the other side so I think we're going to have to redo and just stick to the 6.2 mm magnet size so here I've made a new model and these are just using 6.2 mm holes I'm pressing the magnets in and it takes a little bit of force but can still manage to get them in sometimes they're a little tricky and you just got to make sure that they are facing the right way and then press down on them so they fit in hitting resume on the print will cause it to start printing again once the nozzle is heated up and it'll start printing over that final layer as we can see because it's press fitted in to the 6.2 mm hole it's not jumping out this time and it's printing directly over the top without the magnet jumping out it only needs to do two layers so this is doing its final layer over the top and it will then be completed and we can pop this off the build plate and then take a look once we remove the brims we can now give it a test and perfect so it attracts to each other quite strongly and we can move on to something a little more complicated now we can start moving into a proper design we know that our tolerance is going to be 6.2 mm x 2.5 mm and we can apply that to an actual model and what I've designed here is just a simple little jewelry box it's a smaller one so it's not going to take too long to print but it's going to use what we know so far so all I've done here is designed a base and then a top lid this isn't really a tutorial on how to model in Fusion 360 it's more about how to apply this embedded magnet technique into your prints so I'm going to sort of assume that you know how to do some sort of modeling and apply these techniques in your own way so what I've done here is just made a simple box shed out and then fill ited around the edges if we take a look at a section analysis you'll see how I've created it so we'll pull this back so here we have a section analysis set up and you can see our magnet cutout is just below the Sur surface and I'm going two layers high again I'm using a 2 layer height so it's going to be4 above infusion to create this hole what I've done is I've created a sketch on the surface of where I want the hole but then I've set the start point to offset from that layer and it's going to offset 04 in the negative so that's where it's going to start cutting out and then I've made my cut out 2.5 mm so it drops 4 and then it cuts 2.5 and it does that in each of the four corners and it's the same for the lid as well so whatever you design whether it's a box or a fridge Magnet or something that needs magnets inside that's pretty much what you do create a cut feature but make it start from a certain layer down so .4 in my case and then cut into your material again 2.5 and then from here once you have your model complete you'd send it over to print so infusion we go file 3D print and I've set it up as a custom print utility so it's going to go straight into bamboo I want my entire model and I'll go okay and then we just wait for bamboo Studio to load up with bamboo Studio open and it's about to load into our file but it's going to ask us do you want to load this as multiple parts so we say yes and here as is our box we first need to right click on this and split it and this isn't going to be the same for every case uh it depends on the model that you're making I'm just sort of showing you the workflow for this particular model that I've made so I've split it and I can Auto arrange I do need to flip this lid around so I'm to push F on the keyboard for face selecting that object first then F and then hit the top face and that's just going to flip the face that you select onto the build plate I also need to arrange these a little more so it's closer to the edge so I can access it easier and probably better to do that from the top view so I can go control1 to go into a top view and I'm just going to drag this part over here and this part over here checking our print settings we've got. 2 for our layer height our strength I'm just going to go for two normally I'll do three for something like this for a bit more strength but it's just a fast Sprint so we just want two I can change my infill down to 10% because it's not going to really be that strong of a part I don't care too much and I'm not going to use a brim for this model because it does have a fairly large base I don't think it's going to need it now we need to add our paes so the first thing we can do is go to slice plate wait for it to load we have our first stop is going to be on this area and then it's going to continue Printing and then it's going to stop over here and then finish so we need our first dragging it down until we can see it and then just using the up and down keys to get to that final layer so we can see that's the one where it's going to print over the top we need to go one back from that so this is where we need to add our pause can right click go add pause now to add a second one we need to slice again so we slice and the next one's going to be all the way up here okay so that's our final top layer we want to come one back right click add pause and then slice plate and this would now be ready to send off to print so all I need to do is print plate and wait for it to pause and I can add the first magnets in and then resume wait for it to print the rest and pause and then put the last magnets in and then resume and finish off and we are done so let's start the print and see how we go so here we have the first pause in our G-Code and I'm inserting the magnets into the box you may notice that the box is positioned at the back of the build plate and that's only because I filmed this in a bit of a different order but learning from my mistake that's why I showed in the slicer to move it to the front of the build plate so it's a bit easier to access anyway the 6.2 mil tolerance holes weren't too difficult it required a bit of a press and I was worried that I might upset the Z offset of the build plate but it seemed to be okay once the magnets were in place for the first part I then resumed to continue into the second pause now here we are on the second pause in the G-Code and you can see I'm struggling with putting the magnets in a bit more I think this is because there's a little bit of a weight between where it actually paused and things cooled down a bit and I think that may have constricted the tolerance a little more than I was expecting and the only way I could really fix this was to grab a small hammer and just press the magnets in myself with a bit more force it did work in the end but I wasn't really happy with with possibly upsetting the Z offset but I continued the print from here and it seemed okay and here we have the final print in a dual color silk I think it came out really well and if we take the lid check out the magnets and it snaps together perfectly so I'm quite happy with this but I think I can refine things a little more just because those magnets were a little too difficult to put in so there is one more thing I think we can improve on and that's using super glue and increasing the size of the hole just a little bit bigger to 6.3 mm this way there it's not a friction fit anymore but I can go along I can put a drop of glue in each of the holes and this makes it much easier just to drop the magnets in place I don't have to worry about pressing them down and upsetting the balance of the bed level or anything I can just drop the magnets in they glue in place in about 5 seconds and then hit resume on my print and it'll print over the top as you can see because they glued in place now the hot end isn't picking them up at all and then I'll just continue this process for the next pause in the G-Code so again applying a drop of glue to each of the holes and then putting the magnets in now it's important not to put in too much glue because you don't want it overflowing so just a tiny drop is enough and then you can put the magnet in place there's also one more thing I want to show you if you're going to be making multiples of these you can actually use one part to kind of set the polarity of the magnets for the next part so as you can see here I've dropped the magnets into the four corners and then I can use this to press down on the lid and I can do this for multiple parts so again here you can see I've got the magnets on each of the four corners and then I've got a new lid that I've just printed I can test fit it make sure it's all aligned first put a drop of glue in each corner and then I can just press down on top so this means that the polarity is going to be correct every time I do it and I don't have to worry too much it also means there's consistency to the polarity in a group of products so I might make a bunch of these boxes and I want Lids from different boxes to fit on other boxes and I need to make sure the polarity is right so I can kind of use this as a Baseline and always have polarities in the correct position and alignment and just drop it in place quite easily and so that brings us to the end of this video I hope you found it informative and it's given you some inspiration for some of your own designs I think it's a really easy technique once you dial in your tolerances and it can really bring your 3D printing to a new level as you can see here I've made these two boxes from different materials and they came out really good one's for gemstones and one is for some gold and silver I'll make sure to put a link to these files in the description of this video so you might want to download it and print it for yourself otherwise get out there and make your own designs and finally if you have found value in this tutorial then please consider subscribing to the channel and liking the video and until the next video thanks for watching

Channel: DraftID

Views: 157,907

Keywords: 3D Printing Tutorial, Magnet Embedding, 3D Print Projects, DIY 3D Printing, Magnet Integration, Creative Printing, Functional Prints, Printing Techniques, Innovative 3D Printing, 3D Printer Guide, Advanced 3D Printing, Printing with Magnets, 3D Modeling Tips, Practical 3D Prints, bambu lab, x1c 3d printer, neodymium, bambu studio, 3d print pause, 3d printing pause and resume, 3d print pause at layer, gcode pause, 3d print magnet insert, 3d print embed magnet

Id: wJgoH2Or03s

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024