Action camera mount, part 2: Refine and print

00:01

Welcome to another Shapr3D tutorial. My name is Andrew Camardella. I'm an industrial design consultant and professor at DePaul University. We're going to take a look at this 3D model that we created in the last video, and we're going to work on refining the shapes overall and making sure that the mechanics of this work correctly. We're also going to revise the dimensions of this CAD model so that it is compatible with an off-the-shelf injection molded action camera mount. And then we're going to make sure that this part is 3D printable.

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So we're going to split up this model and make sure that we get ideal strength in all of the components that we'd like to test. Let's get started. We pick up where we left off on the previous set of models. You'll see that we have a couple of different versions here. And this middle version is our original dimension model. We're going to work on this model next. But we have these two other side models. This one here, we're going to end up using in the future to get these three tines to be an additional feature for us.

00:59

And that's already built, it's already linked, it's gonna update automatically with the model that we're building right now. So I'm just gonna hide those. The model that's over here is actually a set of unlinked copies. And while they're linked over here with these two bodies, they're listed here in the history as unlinked copies. So I'm just gonna come over here and delete the unlinked copies and our history tree updates and those models are now gone.

01:26

Next, we're going to verify some overall dimensions of this part so that we can make sure that it matches the part that we're trying to interface with and copy. So let's take a look at this part. I have some calipers here. They're not the best calipers in the world, but it'll be good enough for us to take some overall dimensions. The width here is 35.1.

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and the overall length here is 46.2. So let's go input that back into our model. So here we're gonna type in 35.1, and over here we're gonna do 46.2.

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And you can see here that the model did not update correctly. We're getting some errors here in our history tree. And we're gonna do a little bit of troubleshooting and figure out how to fix these issues. So if I come over here and I expand the extrusion, it says we have an invalid selection. We have a profile that's missing two references. So I can click fix, and it'll show me an outline of the profiles that are missing. So I'm gonna cancel out of that really quickly. I'm going to create a break point.

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So that way I can look and see what this sketch was doing specifically. And we can see here that this line didn't update along with our original sketch. It says 45 millimeters instead of 46.2. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to add a constraint by shift-clicking both the point and the top line that I'd like to connect to. I'm going to type coincidence.

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And I'm also going to do the same thing down here. I'm going to shift click the point and the line. I'm going to click Coincident. And everything moves back into place. And you can see that that extrusion point popped back up. One of the things that I wanted to maintain here was our origin point. You can see that our drawing is sliding around a little bit. So what I'm going to do is bring it over here. And I'm just going to lock that point in place. And that should prevent everything from moving around.

03:30

If I come back to our feature tree, I can now move my breakpoint down and see the next few features if those are still affected. And they look like they're working okay. So I'm going to close out of the breakpoint. We're going to jump back into the sketch here that's underlying all of this model. The thing that we're going to focus on is making sure that this clip that comes up here is correctly dimensioned. I'm going to double click on the sketch to activate it.

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And there's a few things here that I wanted to adjust. Firstly, these dimensions here aren't really referencing anything specific. And so because I'm gonna be taking measurements off of a direct model, I wanna make sure that the dimensions represent how I can measure the model itself. So we're gonna start with our first dimension that we have left, which is the six millimeters here. We're gonna jump over to our part that we're referencing. And I can see that this dimension here is 6.6 millimeters for that overall clip dimension.

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The other thing I'm going to do is measure this overall height here, which is 25.8. We're going to reference this top point down to this midpoint. And so I need to grab this dimension here, we're going to call this 25.8. And since we're only taking half of that, we're going to divide that by two, brings us to 12.9. The other dimension I can reference here is how far away this point is from the outer edge.

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So I can measure that and that comes out to 3.2 millimeters. The other dimension I wanted to grab was this outer dimension, which is a bit tricky to grab, but we're gonna call that 24. If I click on this point and this line, I can grab out this dimension, 24 divided by two, and that's 12. And I can click and drag things around just to make sure that I've started to reference them and put them in place.

05:25

The very last dimension I want to grab is this leg right here. The way that we're going to do that is just approximate this inner length. So we're going to call it 19. So I'm going to come in here and I'm going to add a dimension. We're going to say 19 divided by 2. The other thing I wanted to do here was to also shorten this middle track that goes down the center of this part.

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You can see that this doesn't come all the way to the end. So I am going to add an extra line here that comes across. And I want this to be horizontal. Gonna measure the width of this part here. And that comes out to be 33.8. I want it to be 33.8 divided by two away from the middle. And that gives us our center spine down the middle of this clip.

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So we're going to look at the rest of the solid model here and verify the last few things now that our dimensions are set. And I'm going to just look at our clip here on the side. And it's mostly controlled by this extrusion. And one of the things I wanted to verify was this overall height of the extrusion. So I'm going to measure the overall height here paying attention to the curve on the bottom of this part. And we're getting about 12 millimeters. So I can come in here and just type in 12 millimeters.

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and everything updates nicely. The other thing I wanna do is to verify that this internal shape of this clip is set correctly. And I can come in here onto this end sketch and double click that. And right now this is referencing the top surface. So this is measuring the overall height based on projected sketches. The other thing that's driving the shape of this is this measurement here.

07:18

And again, this is a difficult measurement to make with calipers on the part that we have. And the way that I can do that is take a rough measurement of the inside of this clip here. It's hard to get my calipers in there, but that's about 5.1. So that's kind of our maximum measurement. And then the other measurement I can do is right here on this clip, which is about 4.3. So we're gonna use those two numbers as our upper and lower limits. And I'm gonna add a new measurement here. And this 4.8 is about the middle of our

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maximum and minimum dimensions that we just took. So I'm gonna leave this at 4.8 and what we can do is come in and edit this if we need to as we print and we see how accurate our machine is compared to what our model is. The next thing I'd like to do is adjust the center track and we had created the sketch for it but the three dimensional model didn't update for it. So we're gonna come in here and look at this extrusion. And what I can do is I can edit

08:14

the faces that are being selected. And right now it's selecting both of these major faces. I just want to select this interface here. We're going to click Done. And we see that that feature now disappears entirely. So we need to make sure that that is being referenced properly throughout our history. And because we changed the profile faces, it has slightly changed how our downstream features are rebuilding.

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So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to actually move this extrusion ahead of our first mirror. And that's because originally we were using the entire length of this, but now we're only using half. So I'm going to change the target bodies. I'm going to shift click and add that target body there. And I'm also going to now troubleshoot a little bit. So if I insert our breakpoint after our second mirror, you see that we are getting

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our copies and our mirrors to work correctly. So I'm gonna just keep moving our break point down and our extrude is working fine there. Our Boolean is connecting all those things together. We have a sketch here and then we have another extrusion. So it looks like when we make this extrusion, it's not referencing the sketch properly. And if we look inside of the sketch, we see that the drawing that is going to protect this feature from being removed from the extrusion is missing.

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So we're going to double click on this. We're going to get into that sketch there. And I'm going to just project this face back onto that sketch there, since we lost it. We're going to click Check. That's good right there. We're going to move our break point. And we're going to see that our extrusion, again, deletes that feature. So we're going to jump into the extrusion. We're going to edit the profile faces.

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going to have to delete these faces here and we can re-reference those like that. We're going to click done. So now we have our feature back and everything is working correctly. The next thing we're going to do is adjust some of the features of the clip that fits into this bass plate and I'm going to hide our body here. I'm going to bring back our clip and there's a few things I wanted to change here.

10:35

One of them is that this height here is directly based off of a subtraction boolean that we had done earlier. So if I click through, I can see that we had done a boolean here that subtracted our, a major extrusion in order to build that component. Let's see if we can get our break point working. So we had built a block here and then we.

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did a boolean to subtract the clip from that block. So that means that this inner surface here is at exactly the same height as the inside edge of that clip. And I'd like to relieve that a little bit. So I'm gonna add an offset face here just to bring this down. Right now it's saying that the total height here is 4.8 and earlier measured that clip to be 4.2. So I'm just going to subtract 0.6 from that.

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and that'll drop that face down.

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I can keep moving my breakpoint along. And we cut our slot. And then we also make this extrusion here. And this face here matches up with this back face here. So I can come through and instead of having this be a distance that's minus three millimeters, we're just gonna reference that other face. We're gonna say to object, and we're going to then select the object here.

12:09

and click Done. So now these two faces line up. We have our breakpoint still here. I'd like to keep moving this. At this point in the previous model, I had started making fillets here to kind of round over those corners. And I think I'm going to change that a little bit. So what I'm going to do is actually bring my breakpoint back up here like this. And what I'd like to do is actually just make a taper on this front edge.

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So I'm going to select this edge here, and I'm going to drag it in, and it's going to cut away those corners. We're just going to make that an 8mm chamfer. I can keep moving down. So I would expect my fillet here to break because that edge no longer exists. And I don't need these right now, so I'm just going to delete them. And I'm going to come in here and add some fillets. So I'm going to click this edge here, and this edge here.

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and we can fill it these the same by clicking and dragging and we can make that five millimeters. So the last thing I'd like to do here is to shorten this middle tine here and I'd like for this this outer tine here to be able to sort of flex into the space that's being occupied by this tine here. I also want to open up this center channel here so that the bass plate slides through it. So I'm just going to shorten this and

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do a face offset and just make my total length an even number. So I'm just going to click 40. That looks good right there. And I'm just going to add a little fillet here so that I don't have any interference. And then I also want to add a little chamfer so that it makes it easier for this part to slide around the base plate center spine. And we're just going to do 0.5 just like that.

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And the very last thing here is I wanted to make sure that my offset that was originally listed here was still working. And it looks like it is. So let's see if we can do a little bit of troubleshooting. I'm going to insert a break point.

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I go before this face offset here, we can see that the face offset is expanding that gap, which is exactly what we're looking for. This chamfer is a little small now. So I'm going to actually move this chamfer after the face offset. And I'm going to also add in the third edge on the side here.

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So that completes the clip. And at this point, I am going to open up our original body. Everything looks like it fits together pretty well. And I'm also going to do a quick check here by looking at the section view. We can see that we have some gaps here, so that allows the parts to slide past one another. At this point, I'd say this is a good time to test this part out, and we could start 3D printing.

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So if I click on file and export, I'm going to choose 3MF. I'm going to have a resolution high, include the mesh bodies. And then I want to make sure that my hidden items do not get included in the body. I'm going to export those. I'm going to save this. Next, we're going to open up our slicer for our 3D printer. I'm using Creality Print here. I'm going to open our 3MF file that we saved out. The nice thing about 3MFs is that

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is that it saves each of the bodies inside of the file as separate items and allows you to edit those in the slicer individually. So I'm going to select everything. I'm going to do an auto layout. I'm also going to have it automatically pick the bottom. I'm going to reorient these parts here so that I get maximum strength in each of those pieces. So first thing on the main clip here, I'm going to make sure that the barbs that are on the side of each of these tines are

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printed without any support material. I'm also going to make sure that the tine that has the most flex, it's gonna have its major layers printed parallel to the X, Y plane. I'm gonna try to maximize the strength in the bass clip here by printing it on its side. And that way I don't have to remove any support material from inside of the clip. And also the X, Y plane layers are going to be giving me the most strength through that. And I don't have to worry about anything delaminating from the Z axis.

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Now that we have our 3D printed parts, it's time to do some testing. If we look at our original parts here, they snap together pretty nicely. So we're trying to see what the differences are between the original parts and our 3D printed pieces. The first thing we can do is take our clip from the original and slide it in. We're seeing that there's a little bit of play with the two parts and that really comes from a small tolerance difference.

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between this overall width here. So 22.9 on our printed part and on our original, this is about 22.3. So about a half a millimeter difference between these two components, something that we can adjust in the 3D model. The other thing that we can do is take our clip here and slide it into our bass plate. And this gives us a nice positive lock. We do have a little bit of interference here where we can add a little bit of tolerance.

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But the other thing you might notice is that it's quite a bit harder to slide this part in and out. And that's due to a couple things. One is that this tine is quite a bit thicker, almost twice as thick as the tine on the original part. So in the model, we can thin this up a little bit to get a little bit better flexibility. The other thing we could do is change the material. Right now, this is printed in PLA. PETG or ABS might be a better material for that. And then finally, we have these two barbs on the side.

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And if we measure the overall width here, we get about 33.5 millimeters. And if we measure the overall width of our original, we get about 31.7. So almost two millimeters of extra width here, which means we're pressing this quite a bit harder. And that's where our stretch fractures are coming from and where the extra rigidity is coming from. So with that, we could adjust our 3D model, we could improve our tolerances, and we could start working on making this a smoother fit. In the next video, we're also going to start adding this elbow joint here.

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and we're going to create parts that fit with this 3D printed model that are going to maximize the strength by the way we orient the part in the printer. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.