3D Printing

 Hi! I will be showing you what I did for 3D Printing. I have decided to create a hinged box as my subtractive product. Here are the steps that I did to make the hinged box.

1. I opened Fusion360 and selected 'Box' under the 'Create' section.

2. Next, I create the hinge for the box. Using the midpoint of the length of the box, I drew a horizontal construction line. After that, I created 3 circles with the same center point with different sizes. I then used the sketch dimension to space each circle out. I space the 1st smallest circle to the 2nd circle to 0.2mm and the 2nd circle to the 3rd circle to 3mm. I then space the middle of the circle to the side of the box to 5mm. After that, I drew a line from the side of the box to the 3rd circle to create the support for the hinge and put it to 45degree. I did the same for the top and bottom for the hinge.

3. After that, I cut the box in half using 'Midplane' under 'Construct'.

4. After that, I extrude the top of the hinge.

5. After that, I extrude the sides of the hinge. For the other side, I had to change the start of the extrude from profile plane to object and choose the other side of the box. I had trouble making the cylinder between the two sides of the hinges so I had to make the top non visible and extrude the bar for the hinge for it to rotate. I changed the extent type from distance to 'to object' and connected it.

6. Next, I wanted the inside of the box to be hollow so I decided to go back a few steps where I made the box and made it empty by using 'shell' under 'modify' and selected all the 6 faces. I made the thickness of the walls to 2mm.

7. I had to assemble the component so I used 'new component' under 'assemble' and selected the top and bottom of the box. I then use 'joint' under 'assemble' and connect the top inner hole of the hinge to the bottom hole of the cylinder. After that, i rotated the box to 180deg.

8. After that, I am done with my design and use the tool 'make' and selected the entire box and deselect the checkbox for 'send to 3D print utility' and clicked 'ok'.

This allows me to save it as stl file and I renamed it to HingeBoxExample v1. After that, I launched Ultimaker Cura and opened the stl file.

9. After that, I slice it to find out the print duration. I found out that the print duration was 12 hours 54 minutes.

10. I did not change the original settings and was trying to decrease the time to 1 hour. I tried many attempts to size it down as changing the settings in cura does not affect much compared to sizing it down. I had a friend, Albie to teach me how to size my product down in Fusion and after many attempts I managed to get it to 1 hour printing time. I did not know which type of 3D printers i'll be using so I changed to Creality Ender-3 the next day I went to 3D print.

11. This is my final product!

stl File Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vtHBy9Fo5xQSpYlNuF1tH7Gi-mnbMdJz/view?usp=sharing

f3d File Link: https://a360.co/32oZjuA

Reflection:

I chose hinged box as a subtractive product because it was not difficult to make for beginners and the hinged box is subtractive because it requires 3D printing to make the hinge as it hard to put the top hinge together with the bottom hinge with the cylinder between the sides in the hole of the top hinge. It requires it to be in-built. I am quite happy and proud of myself because I managed to do it myself and I learnt some new functions in Fusion360 such as Inspect to see the inner side of the hinged box and to measure it and I learnt how to make a hinge. Overall, this practical was a success but I had to create another 3D print design as the 1st design was too small so I had to scale it up. I am also reaching my goals of getting better at Fusion360 and learning how to 3D print.