My Secret To Perfectly Fitting 3D Prints

it's inevitable when it comes to 3D print designs sometimes you need to interact with the real world so we need to figure out how to create a fitting of some sort and that can feel very convoluted having to get calipers measurements and CAD workflows all over the place but we're overthinking it this is 3D printing we have pretty large tolerances so all we really need is a camera and a ruler and a small portion of this video is sponsored by PCB way jumping straight into it the first thing you want to do is get the two parts that you're wanting to create a fitting for put them in a private room and tell them to get along feeling that and duct tape what you're wanting to do is figure out what the main mating faces to your usually another 3D print design that face you want it to face you and then you're wanting to go far away from it not that far away from it far enough away that when you're using your phone or camera of some sort when you zoom in as foreign as possible this looks as flat as it can be now we're zooming in as far as possible because we're wanting to use the longest focal length which means things will be as orthographic and as flat as possible once you've taken this image this is what you're going to put into your 3D software for me I'm going to be using blender here and then I'm literally just drag and dropping the image in and I'm going to orientate it in a way that is basically easy to design with the first major flaw that is staring us right in the face is that this is definitely not up to scale so here comes the first measurement I'm going to be getting the measurement from here to there for me is 46 millimeters and I'm going to create myself a 46 millimeter Cube so that I have some sort of scale reference I'm going to scale this image to fit correctly to my scale reference Cube and then I'm just going to do some Precision modeling to get this into a rectangular shape that fits this correctly so I'm sure you're starting to get the gist of it here and you might be asking yourself how accurate can this really actually be well I've found that it's a little bit luck on the draw but for most applications even rather big ones it's about about 0.2 millimeter margin of error it increases the bigger you get but just to show you this here this is what 31.95 and in blender we are darn close now from this point onwards you can almost pretty much guess the rest of the workflow we're going to do the same but for all the face elements here we're just going to bring in primitive shapes and then place them in place so that it basically gets as close as possible now one thing that I like to do is I round everything up or down by one or two decimal places because at the end of the day when you're doing Machining work most of the time it's not some random number now there is something else you've got to keep in mind while we're doing all of these shapes including the outside which is the 3D printing tolerance this here is my little Crystal clearance Tower test and tells you what exactly your tolerance is make sure you add this into the design for me it's about a 0.1 so I'm going to make sure that I make everything point one a little bit bigger and then by the end of it I've got all these primitive shapes here they give me the first meeting face now of course there's no actual height to any of this so if you're wanting to go that one step further with your design you can do the exact same workflow but take a picture of a completely different face this time and do exactly the same again you already have the length of this and now you actually even have it inside of your 3D modeling program so you can use that as a reference point and just carry on going as much as you want now after a little bit of tinkering around I got to this meeting plate right here now let's 3D print it and see how the fit goes but just before that let's quickly pay those bills with today's sponsor PCB way is a game changer for makers with their vast range of cost-effective services from pcbs to CNC Machining sheet metal fabrication injection molding and every imaginable 3D printing process click the link in the description to explore your world of maker possibilities with PCB way and a big thank you to PCB way for sponsoring this video thank you [Music] and here we have that print let's check if it fits it fits perfectly no rattle in case you can't tell from that because obviously you can't I did another version here that has all the holes and that just fitting in super duper suddenly very nice and truly now with this I can go on and carry on my design away remember the key thing here when it comes to Precision modeling is to get the final function I'm looking for a fit that's going to fit that doesn't matter about sometimes you don't have to be ridiculously accurate about that and sometimes you do the main thing here is keep in mind the final fabrication process that you're using here so in this case fdm 3D printing and you're dealing with filament no matter what you're going to have one to two decimal places of inaccuracy so go ahead and play around with that letting you just get making quicker so use this workflow I really hope it helped out and a massive thank you to my patrons truly you guys are absolutely awesome and without you guys I wouldn't be able to do what I do here on maker tales and if you're enjoying what I'm making here you think I'm worthy of your support I would love to see you there too remember that we have a Discord thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue

Channel: Keep Making

Views: 132,721

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Id: 0VCss6i7HAk

Length: 5min 42sec (342 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023