Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How To Model Threads For 3D Printing (fusion 360)”.
Welcome back today, i have a treat for you. I am so excited. I just finished modeling and printing and designing this modular thumb stick extension system for people gamers who have physical disabilities. This is a system that allows you to extend the thumb.
Stick of your game controller with all kinds of different attachments that do different things and the fact that it’s modular means that you can design different stuff to go on top of it to help different people. I’M going to upload these files to thingiverse and prusa printers. You can download them there for free share them with people who need them, but for you today, i’m going to show you how i design and print threads that actually work and screw into each other and all of that fun stuff. Now i only know how to do this in fusion 360.. So that’s what i’m going to show you if you know how to do this and other packages feel free to comment down below and share that knowledge.
It could be super helpful, especially because i’m about to run a contest for 3d printed uh accessories for people with physical disabilities, keep your eyes peeled for that. So now, let’s jump right into the tutorial. All right, you’re going to start off, i’m just going to create a 10 millimeter diameter circle and then a box that i can drill a 10 millimeter hole into that circle is going to be threaded. The hole is going to be threaded, they’ll thread it to each other.
If you stick the 10 millimeter, it makes it really easy, because that’s just a common size, not necessarily though so i extrude these out just to give us some distance to play with uh. I did 50 millimeters, it doesn’t matter. The point, is you have a 10 millimeter cylinder and a 10 millimeter hole so to create the threads select that surface of the cylinder go over here and select thread you have to check model. This is what actually gives you, the geometry. You have to check this. You can see here, 10 millimeter, 10 by 1.5.
That’S our thread, designation, i’m going to do the same thing, the same measurements on the whole. Now again, i had to click model, that’s very important! So in theory that could work if you had a printer that was perfect, but this really is the step that makes it work for me. There’S three main surfaces here: there’s a top a side and a bottom, and what i’m going to do is i’m going to reduce these i’m going to go one at a time and do an extrude and do negative 0.1 millimeters? I do it to the side. First then, the top of the thread and then the bottom of the thread – and this just gives you the space that you need for everything to mesh together. Even if your printer is not perfect, you can do it to actually both the hole and the the bolt. I do that often just so things are nice and easy and it still works beautifully, but it’s not necessary. So that’s it uh! Those you know sometimes there’s a little bit whenever you pull them. First, pull them off of the print bed.
There’S a little bit of resistance to get things going. The first couple layers might have elephant foot or you know various other reasons. There might be a little bit of um variation, but that’s really it it’s nice and easy, and it works with all of my printers that i’ve used uh. So you know there you go that hopefully is another tool to add to your tool set of 3d printing stuff.
Now, since you stuck along for the ride this far, let me share another tip for you whenever i need something to fit tight on a controller. You can’t just measure it design, something and print it, because the materials actually have a tendency to shrink different amounts whenever they’re printed, i use pla and it shrinks a surprising amount when it’s printed. So if i want something to fit very snug, very tight, i actually start off by doing this. I measure where i want it to fit.
For example, this thumb stick and then i print off a series you can see here. I have a bunch, a series of rings that are all about 2.2 millimeters different, so the one that is technically the same size as this just simply doesn’t fit on it. Uh it’s it’s too. The shrinkage makes it too small. So then, i end up finding exactly the size that fits the way i want with no slop, and i can use that for the rest of my designs in pla. For this part, so i highly recommend, if you’re going to do something that needs to fit tight.
Do a whole bunch of test sizing pieces before you really go into design to find the size that you need thanks for watching this video. I hope it was helpful for your 3d printing designs be sure to give us a thumbs up. It’S super helpful and keep an eye peeled for the contest announcement soon about 3d printing for gamers with physical disabilities. I’M real excited and it’s on the horizon.
All right see you next time now. .