Modernizing the best Woodworking Joint to use for 3D Printing

hey I'm Mike and welcome to need it make it so I'm always looking for new techniques to use in 3D printing and lots of my inspiration comes from woodworking so today I'm going to show you a few ways to modernize one of the all-time best woodworking joints to use for 3D printing so stick [Music] around every day we're making great progress towards that 100,000 subscriber goal by 2025 so consider subscribing because I'm working hard to make make sure my videos don't suck one of the all-time best woodworking connections is a dovetail joint and they come in lots of different types like the half blind dovetail the sliding dovetail and a Dutchman and the dovetail is great because it locks the joint together but it also provides a lot of glue surface area now when it comes to 3D printing you can buy big printers and print everything in one piece and then deal with the struggles and the costs involved with maintaining a large printer or you can join parts together and make do with a smaller printer with wood we mostly rely on glue joints but in 3D printing glue can be used but I like the idea of being able to take them apart for upgrading or for disassembly so it's ideal to avoid it at least if you're prototyping or testing your ideas let's say that we have a rail that is longer than our print bed we're going to want to make that in two or more pieces so we can bring the parts together and screw them and that's pretty simple but the problem with the screwed connection is that it's hard to bring the joints together tightly which makes it more prone to movement and you're going to lose strength in the joint because you've have the crosssection and we've created those weaker areas what we need is a way to bring the joint together tightly while also keeping the strength in the part to get started with a simple dovetail this is our sample it's a small rail it's already split into two pieces and to create a standard dovetail joint we're going to extrude the dovetail shape that we'd like now in woodworking we normally either use 7° or 14° but here I'm using 15° just because I can we can then combine the Dov tail with one part and subtract it from the other now leaving it like this is just not going to work the joint needs to have some clearance to come together so I'm going to create that using the press and pull feature and I'm going to adjust all of these faces by .1 mm now one small detail that works really well to help make sure that the joint comes together is to radius any of the sharp edges any external edges will receive a.3 mm radius and any internals will receive a point2 that's going to prevent any large buildup around the corners to make sure we don't have too much interference when we try to bring the joint together so here is what a standard dovetail looks like and it's nice but it could be far better so we're going to get this one Printing and we're going to work on leveling up the joint so we can take that same part and create a tapered dovetail and with this type we need to have extruded the dovetail to both sides of the joint that's going to account for the taper angle shrinking it in all directions as we move to the other end all of the other details are the exact same except for the clearance amount needed it's easier to put this joint together and so we only need very small clearances so I'm going to be using 04 mm so it's less than half of the previous one we can also take those exact same details and set them at an angle to the part with the taper dovetail and this one is a scarf tapered sliding dovetail connection and the only helpful tip here when doing this is that you can extrude to an object for the start and the end of the dovetail this is just going to save some steps and unnecessary extra bodies to have to remove the last connection is pretty nice but if you have a part in ttention it could come loose and another issue is that by elongating the joint one or both parts may not fit on the build plate anymore and that may require you to add another joint those very steep overhangs can also be a problem unless you're okay with having it positioned 180° to the other on the bill plate which is going to result in a different look on the tops and the bottoms so let's take those same Concepts and go even further and address some of those issues so the next joint starts off a little bit different we have two pieces that come together on a curve now if we have a width of 25 mm for the rail we're going to need a diameter of let's say 4 mm larger than that the arc Center can also be offset if you want to elongate the curve and just play with it a little bit to see what works best for your case we're also going to need to extend that Arc to use next as well we can extrude both sides and then we need to create a plane along a path we can select the extended Arc from the sketch that we just made and then we we need to draw our dovetail and we're going to match the size of the previous connections as well so now instead of extruding we can use the sweep command along a path we're going to sweep with a slight taper just like the last connections now in this case there isn't an option to limit The Sweep to the faces of an object so we can either slice it or extrude to remove the unnecessary parts we can then combine and also cut the dovetail from the parts and then we can provide the same small clearance of 04 mm and we can radius those sharp edges as well and what I also like to do is adjust the start and ends of the connection for looks and also to have a more positive stopping position and to do that all we have to do is create a triangle filler or a triangle piece to subtract from our part for the smaller end of the dovetail I like to go back and press the end of the dovetail in by 2 mm before cutting it or combining it and then I'm going to offset the mating Surface by half a millim that's if we're printing in the same orientation and 2 mm if we're going to be printing in opposing orientations and this is just to allow more clearance if we have to use bridging in the slicer the final connection comes together and the dovetail is not visible at all this looks good and we have the stopping points on both start and ends of the connection and let's get this printing as well and here are all of our dovetails printed and finished and I even added in a couple extras just for fun I didn't cover this in the design process very well any taper that I've added is either half a degree or 1° and I've kept them really small because that's really all that you need and the more taper angle that we have the more likely it is that the joint can back out on its own so here we have the standard dovetail connection nothing really too special going on here the clearance for this one was .1 mm and you can see with that kind of clearance that I've allowed this is a small joint so I probably could have gotten away with slightly less clearance than that but there's just a little bit of movement you can see there so this is a joint that would probably need to be glued the next joint is a stop scarfed sliding to tapered dovetail you can see that I've stopped it just like I did in the design on the curved version the clearances on this one were 04 mm this one came together really well and the joint remains tight even when I put quite a bit of force on there that's a nice one and the next connection is a curved stop sliding tapered dovetail this one first made an appearance in my previous video for the ender3 version 3 Model K support arms so this one's pretty nice it comes together on that curve and this is another strong joint maybe not quite as strong as the previous one because we had such a long connection on this one but the advantage of this one is that it is great in tension or in compression because it has to come apart on the curve the next connection is basically the same but it's a little more experimental because it comes together on a curve but not very easily you can see here it has this little lip let's see if we can get this one together that little tiny lip just helps it to lock it in position still a strong joint looks good it came together just fine and the last connection that I made is a conical sliding tapered dovetail and this is just fine it seems to come together really tight but this is a much more difficult joint to create and I really can't recommend it because it took me far too long to create this and there we have it all of the different variations of the sliding taper dovetail connections this one I think has to be my favorite just because it's simple and it's elegant looking but I really also like this elongated joint as well just you can't use this everywhere but this one is very strong the main point here is that the longer you can get the connection the better and giving the dovet tail a very slight taper is going to prevent The Joint from backing off and having the taper on there makes it easier to get it together and that allows us to keep the clearances as small as possible you can also experiment with adding more than one dovetail if you have the room and adding glue to the joint is going to make them even better giving you a permanent connection and of course if you're building something with several pieces you just need to make sure that you can actually assemble it if you want to use a connection like this I want to thank my patrons for helping to support this Channel and making these types of videos possible and if you want to support this channel as well there is a link down there below I hope you found this video helpful and maybe it gave you some ideas to use on your own projects take care everybody and we will see you on the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: NeedItMakeIt

Views: 265,682

Keywords: Connecting 3D prints, QIDI, Bambu, X1C, Q1 Pro, Best way to join, way to join 3D, best way to join 3d prints, how to join 3d prints, joining 3D prints, how to join a 3d print, how to connect prints, how to connect prints together

Id: zI8OgRRF5d8

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024