G’day aspiring engineers
Now that I know that many of you are learning Fusion 360 so that you can design things to make on your 3D printer, I’m glad I bought my first one last year. A basic old Ender 3. I’ve made a few things, that’s the good news but I’ve also had a bit of anxiety, I put the thing aside when I realised that there are a whole new world of settings to understand in the slicer software and I was getting defects. Writing newsletters and trying to keep up with video production has me out of breath, out of time and it seems tinkering with the 3D printer is going to be a slow and gradual learning curve.
That’s when I remembered a project I began just prior to the first lockdowns at the time when the pandemic arrived here in 2020. While working at a nearby university I’d heard about recent advancements in commercial metal 3D printing. There were some manufacturing companies in the same town that were interested in a bureau service demonstration of the new technologies such as carbon fibre filled filaments, powder metal filaments, sintered prints and I began to set up a demo where these companies would provide some example parts which were tricky and needed prototyping. A bureau service in the state capital was lined up to do the printing and then visit on a certain day to present results at a public seminar where I would attend with my Materials Science students.
I’m no longer teaching at that university but the bureau services are still out there. The one I would have partnered with in 2020 seems to have gone under but I see there are plenty online. Some have worldwide scope and distribution. It occurs to me that I can still do 3D printing projects and demonstrations, I can still design CAD models for 3D printing and get them printed. I can make videos about the quality of the parts and service these providers offer. I can review the various technologies and make recommendations while I get my head around the settings for my dear old Ender 3.
Anyway, that’s a plan.
Other Channels:
Practical Alchemy (only 1,000 subscribers)
Sometimes a very small channel can have some really good content. One video here is great stuff, something that can help you with fitting two 3D printed parts together and plan ahead to get exactly the kind of fit you want, everytime. https://youtu.be/Re4tKegVfqs
The title of the video is a bit cumbersome, “The beginners Guide to Fit and Tolerance in Fusion 360 – Get the Perfect Fit From Your 3D Printer / CNC”. Whew! But this is standard textbook theory about Interference, Transition and Clearance Fits. The beauty is that you can apply this to your own 3D printer, the second half of the video gives you two test blocks which will give all you need to know about the capability of your own machine so that you don’t have to guess any more.