By wikiyu in 3d Print —

easy 3d printing

Recently I started to really hard use a Fusion 360, its an 3d modeling tool that's free for non-commercial use with some additional asterisks. After that I need to share some thoughts about most 3d models available at printables, thingverse and so on.

People are just lazy about thinking how 3d printers work, and clone well known ideas from molds that they know. 90° angles on the bottom side, not thinking about bridges, forgetting that some side should be considered as base.

Examples? Ok. Lets talk about engineering Ravensburger Gravitrax Junior rip-off. That's a great toys for learning some basic rules of physics. And are not cheap if you want to create something more complicated to simple loop.

Original Gravitrax Junior from the side.

And its of course molded in original set. So when you will look at printables or any other free/cheap models website you will see... perfect rip offs of that model. So you will have one of two issues.

  1. printing in the air on the sides
  2. manual cleaning after using supports

So what you can do instead? I have seen one really good idea:

two parts for single item

One piece is a top with a place to mount a "ring" that fits into lower part. And its great for printing: much faster because of nearly no bridging, much lower use of material due to no supports etc. BUT you have to manual join them and use some glue to make it permanent.

And you can use some 3d printing tricks that will make that prints much easier to print, not need for use long bridges and supports. How? For example using technique of stepping up layer by layer a bit further. 3d printers can do it pretty easy, even older ones, and they can do it for 5-20mm at step depending on printer. Even my old Ender 3 can do about 5-8mm at once. What I mean? Just making bottom not 90° but for example 70° like here:

single part like in first image, but with bottom part on some angle to the horizon.

And yes - I have just recreated most of models from web to just have it much easier to print.

You wouldn't download a car

Also I am thinking about ... legal stuff. How the hell is it possible that hardcore ripoffs of copyrighted items can be available to download from everywhere. OK I understand that there is a lot of new items for (for example) Gravitrax that are not even exist from Ravensburger sets, and its OK, that's like custom mods, custom add-ons. But hey, rips of original ones are much easier to find than that custom ones.

How these companies are not fighting with prusa, and other owners of maker websites for these models? Or our makers world is so small that they not care, or even are happy because people post it on r/someShit or youtube and make their sets more popular, and know that beyond these 20 guys no one will print it?

Are we still so deep in our basements that they don't care and just piss on it?

PS YES these graphics were made in KolourPaint - soft like MS Paint for KDE Linux UI. I am proud of them.