3D Printed Mounting Brackets

Brackets are pretty boring, I know, but being able to 3D print exactly what you need, for just a few cents, just makes good sense (see what I did there?).

I wanted to mount a LED strip underneath my kitchen bench top, but also wanted it to run off batteries so I didn’t have chunky cords to plug in for power. The set that I ended up buying had a battery pack which needed to be mounted along with the strip, as well as a remote. One option would be to use double sided tape, however, this would make accessing and changing the batteries painful. So, a simple bracket was needed. While doing this, I also decided to mount the remote so it wouldn’t get lost.

Like many of the projects on this blog, the entire process from CAD to finished 3D printed parts only took a few hours. Solidworks was used for the CAD modelling, while the brackets were printed on a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus in PLA. A couple of screws up into the bench top and job done. Secure and out of the way, but easy to remove the remote and battery pack when needed.

If you’re interested in more quick projects like this, check out my special friction hooks or hex business card holder tiles.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Print some Aloha

At this time of COVID-19 lockdowns, panic buying and general insanity, we could all do with a bit of aloha. Aloha of course is the traditional Hawaiian greeting, but it also has many other meanings and uses including love, peace and compassion.

If you need a little aloha, you can download this to 3D print for free from Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

This was actually designed to stick on our front door which is freshly painted in a very tropical blue. The design process was very simple:

1. Create the outline in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Export as a DXF file.
3. Open in Solidworks.
4. Extrude.
5. Export as a STL file for 3D printing.

Print it large, print it small, and spread some aloha vibes.

– Posted by James Novak

 

Surviving COVID-19 with 3D Printed Toilet Paper

Most of us would agree that some of the events of the last couple of weeks have overshadowed the seriousness of COVID-19 (Coronavirus). In particular, the panic buying of toilet paper, which seemed to start here in Australia and spread like the Coronavirus itself around the globe, has been quite ridiculous to watch. While there is a serious side to this issue, it’s become one of those situations that you have to have a sense of humour about in order to get through.

In response, I thought it would be fun to start 3D printing toilet paper rolls (aka. loo rolls). What started as a single 3D model last week, quickly turned into a series of different toilet rolls that can all be downloaded for free and stockpiled to your heart’s content! Simply select your preferred 3D file platform to download: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

Collect them all:

1. Hotel Triangle: For a touch of class and those 5-star vibes.
2. Hanging Square: Fully stocked and ready to go.
3. Neat Perf: The clean-cut toilet roll.
4. Half: Nervous times, time to print some more.
5. Last Square: Oh dear….

They were all modelled in Solidworks at half the size of a regular roll of toilet paper. If you prefer a different size, just scale them up or down (i.e. scale 200% to be the same size as a real roll). Great to carry with you everywhere you go for any unexpected emergencies 😉

Divide them amongst your family members, share them with your neighbours, be generous and take a few spares to work – we’re all in this together during Coronavirus 2020.

– Posted by James Novak

 

Shim the 3D printed shim

We’ve all experienced that wobbly table at a cafe and struggled to wedge coasters and napkins under the legs to balance it out. This is where you need a shim, a small wedge that can fill the gap and ensure your drinks don’t go flying. Shim is also fun to say, quick to 3D print, and a good test of your print settings due to the top surface exhibiting the stair-stepped effect.

There are many designs available on popular 3D printing file websites, but I just wanted one that was a useful size (easy to carry with you in a small bag) and that said what it was. So here it is, Shim the shim! You can download it for free on Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory. Alternatively you can follow the basic outline of the design process below to make your own from scratch in your favourite CAD software. It’s similar to some of my previous designs including an “edditive” desk logo which might give you some inspiration for different ways to use text in 3D.

Shim was designed in Solidworks by using the text tool on the top sketch plane. The key is to squish all of the text together so that the letters intersect, meaning they will 3D print together as a single object (in Solidworks you can simply change the spacing of text within the text tool). The text was then extruded 10mm, creating solid geometry. All you need to do to create the wedge shape is then slice a triangular portion off the top, which in Solidworks uses the extruded cut tool. Save to STL and 3D print, it couldn’t be much simpler!

This is a nice quick 3D print and could easily be used as a keyring or give-away item, especially if you design your own. Enjoy, share and print!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Medal and Trophy

As a product designer focused on 3D printing in my job at the University of Technology Sydney, it was no surprise that I found myself being asked to design some 3D printed awards for the end of year 2018 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence. And while not receiving an award (yet!), I think it’s even more fun to get to be designing them – besides, now I can print them out for myself!

I was asked to design 2 different awards which you can see pictured above. The first were a set of 3 medals, and my only brief was to have them 3D printed in metal, and for them be approximately the size of previous medals given out for the awards. I based my design on a spinner concept which I’ve previously printed, with an important feature being the cone-like details which hold this assembly together when printed as a single part. There is no support material required, with one of my goals being to highlight through the design the capabilities of 3D printing in metal. For recipients, my goal was to create something playful and engaging, rather than most medals which are kept in a case and quickly forgotten. Thanks to my friend Olaf Diegel at Lund University for printing these in aluminium and sending them to us in time!

For those familiar with metal 3D printing (Direct Metal Laser Sintering to be specific), you can probably guess there was a lot of manual post-processing of these medals to remove the base supports and polish the surfaces. Below you can see the medal as it comes out of the printer on the left (once cut from the build plate), and the final polished version on the right. All of the base support material you can see in the raw version had to be filed away while held in a vice, before going through a lengthy process of polishing. Slow, painful work, but you haven’t truly 3D printed in metal until you’ve gone through this process, it makes peeling away plastic support material from FDM prints seem like child’s play!

The second award was a trophy which also continued with the 3D printed assembly concept. My only brief for this design was for it to be printed on our own HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer, which is very similar to SLS printing. Many of us have seen the “ball in a ball in a ball” type of prints which are often shown at 3D printing expos and events, and I built off this to incorporate a lattice frame to contain the balls. The basic design was done in Solidworks, however, the balls were just solid spheres at this stage. I then exported them into Meshmixer in order to apply a lattice structure to them, using 2 different geometries. All parts were then imported into Meshmixer in order to export them as a final fully assembled file ready for printing.

A little bit of laser cutting and timber work by a colleague really helped bring the design to life, and again, the trophy encourages interaction and play. Congratulations to the winners and finalists, I hope you enjoy your awards as much as I did creating them. With any luck I might get to design them again in 2 years and bring one home myself for real! 😉

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Desk Logo

Being surrounded by 3D prints and various design projects keeps me creative and inspired, and last year I shared my 3D printed “edditive” logo which features in both my home and work offices. Naturally, when my partner started her own design business called Tropicallday, I had to modify the design for her, and here is the result!

This is a very simple design that anyone could make with the most basic 3D CAD software skill. I created it in Solidworks, however it could easily be created in free software like Tinkercad, with each letter being extruded a slightly different distance, and merged together to form a single object. The final step in this process is to slice the bottom of the text on an angle, so that it tilts towards the viewer – it’s not as obvious in this photo, but you can see what I mean in the edditive print.

A fun little CAD and 3D print project, if you make one yourself, share a photo here on my blog 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

Return of the Beer Bottle Lock

It’s been quite a few years since I first posted this design on my blog – check out where it all began here. One of the great things about sharing designs like this on file sharing websites like Thingiverse or Pinshape is that you get to see when someone enjoys your design and shares their own photos of the print, or even better, remixes it to add their own unique twist to the idea. Someone even made a video on Youtube which featured this lock 🙂

Occasionally I get requests, either on these websites, through social media, or on this blog, for me to make alterations to a design, or share the native design files for someone to more easily modify. 9 times out of 10 I’m more than happy to help. A few days ago I was contacted through Twitter to make a simple variation to my Beer Bottle Lock, removing the text on top that says “hands off my beer” to provide a blank surface for someone to more easily add their own custom text.

Given that the file is parametric in Solidworks, the alteration only took a few seconds. However rather than email the files direct, it seemed like a good opportunity to share a remix of my own design on Thingiverse, and hopefully benefit even more people. So you can now download this design for free by clicking here, just like the original.

This got me thinking about remixes, and the fact that many of my favourite 3D printing sites like Pinshape and Cults don’t really allow for remixes to be clearly linked to the original source file. I can either upload a print of a design (just photos, not a new STL file), or upload a completely new design. If I want to let people know this new design is a remix, I have to manually write this in the project description, and supply a URL to the original file as you can see on my upload of this new blank version beer bottle lock on Pinshape. On Thingiverse, you can specifically say your design is a remix of another with the click of a button, and a link is created so others can easily go to the original, and see all remixes to find the one most appropriate for them. This is a better system that ties in with the whole Creative Commons (CC) licencing used by all of these websites.

I hope some of these other file sharing websites will take up the challenge to make file attribution and remixing more transparent, it shouldn’t be left up to the user to understand the licensing options and manually enter this information. A common standard across a website, as done by Thingiverse, would really help encourage more sharing, and appropriate attribution to designers.

– Posted by James Novak

edditive in 3D

A short-and-sweet post for a short-and-sweet design.

Last week I was watching a Youtube video about XYZ Workshop, well known for their 3D printed In Bloom Dress which was printed in 191 separate pieces on desktop machines (which you can actually download and make yourself if you have the time!) In the video I noticed they had their logo on the desk, and for whatever reason, I decided I wanted to 3D print my own similar design.

Having already developed a logo in Adobe Illustrator, it was a relatively simple process of exporting a DXF file, bringing it into Solidworks, and “smooshing” (I don’t know if that’s the technical term!) the letters together so that it would print as a single object. A few different extrusion depths and an angled cut on the back, and you have a neat little logo design to smarten up your workspace. This one was printed on an UP Plus 2 in a couple of hours, the detail is great and no support material needed.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed “Marshmallow Challenge”

Have you ever done the Marshmallow Challenge? Chances are you’ve done something similar at school, or if you’ve ever been to a team building workshop it’s a pretty popular creative exercise. Basically teams must build the tallest freestanding structure they can in 18 minutes using 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and 1 marshmallow on top. Tom Wujec has been running these challenges for many years and presented a great TED talk if you want to find out more about the challenge and what can be learned from it.

Well now I’ve put my 3D printing twist onto the challenge, running what turned into a very competitive series of workshops for the Intro to 3D Printing course at my university. Teams were given a selection of materials we had readily available for model making (20 paddlepop sticks, 1 paper plate, 2 paper cups, a few drinking straws, a length of masking tape and a length of string) and given a very simple brief – build the tallest freestanding structure possible during the 2 hour workshop. The catch:

Teams were each given an UP Plus 2 3D printer and laptop with Solidworks, and could print as much as they wanted to help build the structure.

Now that makes things interesting! These are first year students only new to CAD and 3D printing, so what can they both design and print in such a limited time? Do you print lots of small things, or 1 big thing? How can you tweak the 3D print settings to get things printed as quickly as possible? What do you do when your print doesn’t work? It turns out that this challenge can teach you a lot about 3D printing, and how to rapidly test, prototype and build without wasting any time like in the normal 6 week projects.

As you can see from the photos, the results are very impressive! The winning team built a structure up to 249cm, which basically meant they used all the materials end-to-end and could not go much higher even if they had more time. This team 3D printed small little rectangular connectors for the paddlepop sticks, and with a lot of delicate balancing, managed to get their structure stable at the very last second. Much much higher than I expected when I set this challenge! They were in a very close battle with the team that came second for the day, reaching 238cm with a slightly different connection method where they used 3D printing to connect the paddlepop sticks to the cups. What you might notice with the top 3 teams is that 3D printing was used for small connecting elements that could be quickly printed, whereas some of the other teams (eg. 4th place who I only have a photo of part of the structure) were 3D printing much larger bases and simply ran out of time to push their structures quite as high.

All of the students were very involved and motivated by this task, it’s something I will run again in future classes and 3D printing workshops as a way to push the limits of the 3D printers and break them out of being so precious about what comes off the printers. It also gets them thinking about how to combine 3D printing with other methods of prototyping, you don’t necessarily need to 3D print every part of your design as it’s quite a slow process, particularly for FDM machines. Feel free to make your own twists on this challenge in the classroom, and I’d love to see your results! Maybe the 3D Printed Marshmallow Challenge will be the next big thing?

– Posted by James Novak

Design a 3D Printed Snap-Fit Enclosure

Today I’m pleased to share a tutorial that I’ve written for my new friends at Formlabs called “How to Design 3D Printed Snap Fit Enclosures.” Follow the link to read all the details, but in short, this tutorial will guide you through some of the important steps to designing your own custom enclosure suitable for 3D printing, and featuring a snap-fit detail so that you can easily open and close the enclosure without needing any tools. The tutorial is done using Solidworks, however you should be able to follow along no matter which 3D CAD software you use, even the free ones like 123D Design – the process and tips are exactly the same.

For this tutorial I used a PINE64, the famous $15 64bit computer funded on Kickstarter in 2015. The enclosure is designed to offer something unique and exciting to complement the computer, and of course take advantage of 3D printing. You can access all of the ports and features with the enclosure fitted, and there’s a great spot on top to store SD cards, USB sticks etc.

By the way, if you just want the enclosure without following the tutorial, of course I’ve uploaded the design to Pinshape, Thingiverse and Cults so you can download it and print it for yourself!

– Posted by James Novak