Make your parts bendy with this design hack - 3D design for 3D printing

this part is printed in rigid ptg yet it bends and flexes like rubber there's a simple design trick that makes it work like this and today I'm going to teach it to you [Music] [Music] [Music] this video is part of a series on creating custom 3D designs for 3D printing using a free on-shape account if you'd like to start from the beginning there's a link in the description to the entire playlist today we explore a design technique that's used to make rigid flat materials on a laser cutter quite bendy and we're going to apply it to 3D printing but even if you don't design your own CAD at the end I've got a version for you which you can apply simply in your slicer to make other objects bendy when I left teaching to do YouTube full-time my school gifted me these beautiful laser cut timber pieces they are Australian made and manufactured and the craftsmanship is fantastic now Timber if it's thin enough can bend quite easily but this material is four millimeters thick yet it's quite flexible and you can see the reason why with this laser cut pattern cut the whole way through the material this means that we can have this fairly complicated curving shape starting with three flat pieces of wood but the final shapes we create don't just have to be rigid we can create live hinges as well creating cases to hold treasured possessions the magnetic latch on top makes this very satisfying to play with for a few years now I've wanted to see if I can recreate this with 3D printing using filament that's also rigid as soon as it gets too thick as a proof of concept I made this very simple example and I'll now show you how to recreate the pattern the first thing I recommend is creating your base shape separately you can then extrude it providing a flat surface to do the pattern sketch on the only other thing to mention is that I did all of my testing with the thickness of two millimeters and this seemed to work quite well so that's what I'd recommend as a starting point we've started a new sketch on the top surface and the actual pattern is not that complicated and you might be surprised how quick it is to generate it I'm only going to be drawing with two tools the center point rectangle and the regular straight line I'd recommend drawing the first rectangles of your slot pattern in the lower left of wherever you want the whole thing to be positioned as this will simplify the process at later steps we're going to start with the center point rectangle drawing it long and skinny here I'm drawing it as a vertical slot but everything works the same horizontally too now these Dimensions I took with calipers from the wooden example I had and they turned out to be spot on the length of the slot can be 30 and the width 0.5 millimeters at this stage we're purposely leaving this unconstrained so we can drag it around into position we're now going to select the same tool snap to the center come up and draw a second one of these rectangles we're immediately going to Dimension the gap between them and I would recommend five millimeters as a starting point we can then use the equals constraint to click on a side of the new rectangle as well as one of the old ones and now the two will match and if they didn't already snap to a line it can do the same for the narrow end of the rectangles too we're going to come up to a straight line tool and then click on the construction tool which can also be toggled with Q on the keyboard we'll now draw a straight construction line between the midpoints of the two rectangle edges and then from the midpoint of that we'll draw another straight construction line setting it to be two millimeters wide once again back to our rectangle tool and we're going to draw a third rectangle that matches the first two again I'll use the equals constraint so I don't have to Dimension this and I'll do so for the long Edge as well as the short Edge now for the final time I'll once again snap to the midpoint of our third rectangle and use that as a center point for the fourth again I'll Dimension five millimeter Gap in between the two and then use equal constraints to get everything matching now it doesn't look like much but this is the basis that we need to create the pattern and to do that we're going to come up and click on the linear pattern tool we can simply drag a box around everything we've drawn so far and now comes the fun part where we tweak the parameters firstly the Gap in between should be twice what we had between our first two so if you recall that was two millimeters so we're going to set the offset to four millimeters by default the padding will be duplicated three times horizontally but we can change this number to suit our needs also by default the pattern will only go horizontally and not vertically and we can see that the amount of duplicates is set to one so to fix this we double click on this number and enter a larger value if we guess incorrectly the first time we can edit this number later the vertical pattern spacing is off so we'll need to change it our slots are 30 wide with a five millimeter Gap in between so we add these together to arrive at 35 millimeters at this stage you should take care to move the camera around and ensure that the pattern isn't overlapping itself if that's the case you know you've got your two offset numbers correct you can also edit the multipliers to extend the pattern if too short and of course change the width if it's too narrow sometimes I assume to save memory it won't preview all of the components instead showing you the start and the end of the pattern but don't worry this has no effect on the final result once we're happy the icon is telling us to click the left Mouse button to make the pattern final and we're almost ready to go now the good thing is even after the pattern is finished we can still come back and edit the multipliers growing or shrinking the extent of the pattern personally I like my patterns to be symmetrical to achieve this from this point we can simply drag a box making sure to only overlap the outer column and then simply press delete on the keyboard with this much happening in the sketch unfortunately onshape does get a little sluggish but it will get there after a few seconds after creating a detailed pattern like this in a sketch we can easily come back and select any aspects that we don't like highlighting them and then deleting them doing this will let your slot pattern be as visually appealing as possible everything is now symmetrical from left to right as well as top to bottom so our final step is to Center this pattern on the middle of this object and this is part of the reason why we did it on a separate sketch we're going to come down and draw a construction line from the corner of the pattern to the corner of our base shape we'll then repeat that for a second corner and then once more for our third and final corner to finish up all we need to do is to click on each of these three lines and then come up and click the equals constraint after several seconds of thinking time the whole slot pattern should now snap centered and symmetrical on top of the base shape and close it come to extrude or toggle to remove and then rather than clicking each of these shapes one at a time we can simply click sketch 3 over on the left hand side make sure the cut goes the whole way through the base shape and then click the tick to finish the extrude and that's it that's the entire pattern created and hopefully you can see how this can apply to many different designs using those same basic steps to help I've got some lists and diagrams Linked In the description let's quickly recap we want to start by drawing and extruding the base shape here this was a two millimeter thick rectangular prism then we'll start a sketch on top and create four rectangles obviously the dimensions will vary depending on your design and I've created this diagram to tell you those that you should try and stick to versus those that you should play with step 3 is to use a linear pattern tool to extend the slights across the shape and you can grow and shrink the pattern horizontally or vertically to suit your base shape and this previous diagram has some guidelines for how to calculate the offset next up we trim any parts of the padding we don't want this is simply a matter of dragging the Box around unwanted components and pressing delete on the keyboard we then Center or position position the entire pattern above the base shape you can use construction lines and constraints or simply eyeball it and finally we extrude cut the pattern through the base shape to create the slots remember to input by clicking on our pattern sketch rather than each sketch line individually when it comes to slicing this there's really not much you need to worry about I didn't change perimeters infill anything like that the most important thing I did was make sure I was printing in ptg as it has a little more Flex than pla I did test later on with PLA and it will Flex just not as flexible as ptg and if you try to bend it too far it is more likely to fail as for the petg version it was glorious straight off the print bed looking even better than I had hoped for in terms of being tactile this is a very satisfying print to play with it's hard to describe so I recommend that you print one and try it as well as bending in the method that we intended it also acts as a compression or tension spring and I do enjoy watching the padding contort as you apply loads to it with the rectangles becoming triangles when compressed or diamonds when elongated there's a fair amount of degree of freedom in terms of flexing it in directions that we didn't originally intend all in all a great first result proof of concept achieved so now what can I actually make with it my next idea was to create a bowl that started Life as a flat shape each segment is made up of pentagons and if this was twice as big as it is it would be a dodecahedron once again I started by sketching the base shape separately and extruding it to be two millimeters thick I then constructed a simple slot pattern as before and set up some extra lines that I would use to trim after cutting out the slots with extrude I used a circular pattern to transfer the slights around the design to do this you need to change the mode from part pattern to feature pattern and then input any extruded cuts by clicking on them on the left hand side feature list if you're getting errors try clicking apply per instance this one also turned out much better than I had expected each of the segments Flex where I wanted them to and it was clear that each of them met in the corner pretty much on the perfect angle so I went back and designed this little retaining clip designed to clip into the two corner holes when everything was folded the clearances for this are probably at Tad too loose but ultimately it works and after inserting the fifth and final clip I had myself a bowl that was printed completely flat in high-end woodworking there's this great technique where you can get truly organic curves by using steam to bend and then laminate together thin sheets of Timber what I like about these forms is that they're compound curves they curve in more than one direction so to see if I could recreate this I made a long and skinny strip with the in two thirds having the slot pattern and there's another proof of concept this one was successful not only could we twist but we could mimic the timber designs by doing one fold and then twisting the ends to create proper compound curves now that I knew this was possible I wanted to apply the technique to an actual design of my own so I modeled this interesting shape that I figured would make a very unique phone stand the blue section would be a long strip just like in my test piece and the base would be mostly printed flat but with the pattern in this single curve so it could be bent up to then slot into the blue piece I had cut out so everything could slide together and also a raised boss at the front to stop the phone from sliding forward to work out how long the blue strip would be when straight I went into the sketches it made up the curved version and used the measurement tool to measure them individually I then laid down a flat strip with all of these lengths stacked together and repeated my usual steps to create the slot pattern on the left before mirroring it over to the right for the base I duplicated the geometry leaving out the bit that was curled up and then added this on but in a flat configuration I then sketched on the bending pattern and extruded it through to complete the two parts the clearance I designed where the two parts fit together was spot on but even so as I tried to move the compound curve into position the two parts kept on popping apart my Brute Force solution was to use super glue before inserting them into the base once more this kept everything together but I think I had the bend starting from the wrong part of the black base the resultant shape was able to hold my phone but on a much steeper angle than I originally intended so definitely not the elegant curve that I was originally planning in part because the whole base was also two millimeters thick and it was flexing a little bit as well so this version of the concept definitely needs a little more development but I'm sure you'll agree the potential is there at the start I promised a slicer only version so here's how it works in the last tab of the source card is this plant Studio where I've made the pattern by itself and exported a couple of different versions as an sdl where all of the parts are combined this means that if you have an existing thin shape you can right click on it come up to add negative part and then load this will import whatever version that you picked now all we have to do is overlap it with the object and then click slice and as you can see your object will slice with the pattern in place there's different versions to suit different applications and hopefully that means there's a version to suit whatever your project is and you can always make a copy of my source card coming to sketch one edit the amount of copies as well as the widths and then export your own another option is to import these pre-made stls into tinkercad you can then set them to be a hole overlap them with your other part select everything and then click group this will also cut in the Bendy pattern you can add on whatever other shapes you like before you export I quite enjoyed experimenting with this idea and I'm Keen to see what others do with it especially considering its potential to replace Springs and rubber bands in moving objects everything you need is linked below so please head down and try it out thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 3D printing rigid bendable objects g'day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if 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Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 150,906

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d print, 3d printed, 3d printer, design, 3d, cad, bend, laser cut, laser cutting, guide, tutorial, how to, step by step, instructions, petg, experimental, onshape, tinkercad, slicer, fusion360, prusaslicer, bambu lab, p1p, orcaslicer

Id: 8WEqKYa6XRk

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023