3D printing software? [tech]
Nov. 24th, 2025 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidereaI want a widget that doesn't exist so I might be stuck designing it for 3D printing. I have never done this before. For design software, I gather both Onshape and TinkerCAD are available for free. Anybody with experience have opinions which I should start with? I have never used any CAD program before, but am not new to drafting. OTOH my drafting experience was all about 40 years ago. Open to other suggestions available for the Mac for free.
Also, I don't have my own 3D printer, so I'll be availing myself of various public-access options. But this means the iterative design feedback loop will be irritatingly protracted. Also I might have to pay money for each go round, so I'd like to minimize that. Also I am still disabled and not able to spend a lot of time in a makerspace. But I am a complete n00b to 3D printing and have zero idea what I'm doing. Does anybody have any recommendations for good educational references online about how to design for 3D printing so your widget is more likely to come out right the first or at least third time? By which I mean both print right and also function like you wanted – I know basically nothing about working with the material(s) and how they behave and what the various options are, while the widget I want to make will be functional not ornamental and have like tolerances and affordances and stuff. So finding a way to get those clues without hands-on experience, or at least minimizing the hands-on experience would be superb.
Also, I don't have my own 3D printer, so I'll be availing myself of various public-access options. But this means the iterative design feedback loop will be irritatingly protracted. Also I might have to pay money for each go round, so I'd like to minimize that. Also I am still disabled and not able to spend a lot of time in a makerspace. But I am a complete n00b to 3D printing and have zero idea what I'm doing. Does anybody have any recommendations for good educational references online about how to design for 3D printing so your widget is more likely to come out right the first or at least third time? By which I mean both print right and also function like you wanted – I know basically nothing about working with the material(s) and how they behave and what the various options are, while the widget I want to make will be functional not ornamental and have like tolerances and affordances and stuff. So finding a way to get those clues without hands-on experience, or at least minimizing the hands-on experience would be superb.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 09:22 pm (UTC)Earlier this year I needed a small replacement plastic part for my window. It was being sold for what seemed an unreasonably high price. My library lets patrons submit one 3d print each month for free, so I tried that out. I was lucky to find a design which looked perfect for the part I needed on tinkercad.com. The website lets you "remix" existing designs, so I did that with copy&pasting to make it print out several copies of the part in a single print. I wanted extras in case I broke some while trying to install them in window hinge, and for spares for my other windows.
After they were printed, I discovered the design was very close but not quite right for my window. I used metal files to file down the plastic in a few places and was able to make it fit. Otherwise I'd have edited the design and tried again.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 10:35 pm (UTC)Well, making a 3D object that doesn't accidentally have "holes" that can't exist in reality is a skill. (Like: missing polygons, faces that look connected but are not, which will trip up the print in weird ways.) There's a whole other skill about internal scaffolding so the thing will hold together as it is being extruded (if it's not a solid block). How tight the physical tolerances are depends on materials and the printer. If torque or compression are going to be an issue, you need to know a lot about your materials options. Or, do iterations: print with filament A and see if it snaps. If it does, try B.
My friends who own their own printers are constantly having to deal with stuff like -- this job slid during the print, so it was all just slightly askew and I had to re-do the whole 12 hour print. (And even tiny glitches like that can also screw up your fitting tolerances.) Or, oh, my print head jammed and I had to order a new one so it's down for a week. That's probably less of an issue if you're outsourcing to a commercial print shop, but then you're dealing with expensive and time-consuming iterations.
From what I've seen, owning a 3d printer is like 30% "my hobby is 3d printing things" and 70% "my hobby is doing complicated maintenance on a 3d printer".
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-24 11:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-26 03:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-28 08:39 am (UTC)I have participated in printing runs where getting the desired surface smoothness included pretty high amounts of acetone in post-processing… (Of course, treating the surface of a plastic part with strong solvents affects mechanical properties too)
As for missing faces etc., the Lego-like design of constructing things out of correct solids basically avoids it. It is kind of anti-Lego: when I use OpenSCAD (this one is forget-mouse-write-code approach with a domain-specific language), the advice is basically to avoid the surfaces touching lightly (and causing precision issues, super-thin cavities, etc.) Ideally the current surface and the modification should intersect at an angle far from zero. So on each addition and subtraction you want your blocks to overlap instead of fitting. Sometimes that means that the most robust description of a shape includes creating a larger part then cutting off the extras with subtractions or intersections.