Action camera mount, part 4: Create finger joints

00:01

Welcome to another Shapr3D tutorial. My name is Andrew Camardella and I'm an industrial design consultant and adjunct faculty at DePaul University in the industrial design program. We're going to start off this video by picking up where we left off in the last video after we created our bezel. We're going to focus on creating a finger joint here that uses three tines to help us attach other accessories or other designs that we want to add to this overall clip mount.

00:29

As we've done in the previous videos, we're gonna continue focusing on making sure that this model is 3D printable and that we create something that is robust, that takes advantage of the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of 3D printing. Let's get started.

00:48

So we're going to hide our bottom clip now. That's going to be our body 4. And the next thing I'm going to do here to create this feature, which is three little tabs that come out of the top of this clip, I'm just going to make one. They're going to all be the same. And I'm going to start by creating a sketch on our origin planes here, just like this. And on our side view here.

01:17

And I'm going to project a few things to this sketch right away because I need that information in order to draw stuff. So I am going to select those edges here. I'm also going to select this inner edge there. And I think that's going to be good for right now. Just like that.

01:41

And the remaining thing I'm going to do here is really just start to sketch out what this actually looks like. So the top surface is going to have a kind of circle shape like this. And then I want it to come down.

01:58

pretty straight and I'm going to have it kind of bump out a little bit. We're going to have a little bit of extra material behind it, just like that, and do something like this. And now this is all just adding constraints. Let's see if I can hide our other body here so we don't have to see it.

02:26

And the other thing I wanted to add here was a circle.

02:34

And let's see. First thing, let's straighten some things out.

02:43

to select this edge here, and I'm just going to make that horizontal, make this vertical. We'll make this vertical for the time being as well, just like that. I wonder if I could make these tangent. There we go, so they're connected across. And now we can start to dimension some things. So I am going to...

03:13

make a little ledge here that's going to be two millimeters.

03:21

there and I'm going to make another one here that's going to be two millimeters. And basically we're going to cut a hole that's going to pass this tab through it and then these two are going to get caught up on the ledge and they'll prevent it from passing through the clip underneath. So then the other thing I need to do here is I need to make sure that this doesn't go past this bottom surface where this was pulled out of the bottom of that clip.

03:51

And I also want to make sure I have enough material here to support this. So I'm going to make this 2.5. And how thick is this? 3.2. That's plenty right there. Let's make this then just like that. That looks good right there. And I'm going to make this diameter here 15 millimeters.

04:21

And I want this to be slightly above the surface, but not by that much. So we're going to add an extra line here. Or better yet, I could dimension from this edge to this point. And we're going to just make this nine millimeters. So things are coming together nicely. There's a couple of things I need to constrain here still. So there's a tangent. And we need to put a tangent here.

04:52

That looks pretty good. And finally, I want to just make sure I have enough material on the backside of this clip.

05:01

We're going to make that 2 millimeters.

05:06

And that looks pretty good right there.

05:10

And I can just go ahead and extrude this.

05:16

and this needs to be 3.4 millimeters wide, just like that. So the thing that we can come here and see the extrusion is that I would like to actually have this be symmetric for a total distance of 3.4. So we're gonna make this 1.7, just like that. And that way this part is centered on the overall clip.

05:45

So I think that is a good start to the geometry. And I am going to bring back our body. I'm going to take a look at it. It looks like we might have some interference here with this edge here. If we make more of these, we're going to actually array this so that we're going to make copies on either side of it. We can go ahead and do that now, actually.

06:13

I'm just going to double check that this is total of 3.4. That's correct. And we need to make a space. It's also 3.4 for the next one over. So I'm going to just select this body here.

06:32

And we're going to make a copy. And we're going to link that copy. And then we'll move this over. And 3.4 is just going to be the width of the part. So we need to add another 3.4. So we could even do some math in this box. We can say 3.4 times 2.

06:57

like that.

07:02

And we're going to make another copy right next to it. Make sure that that's linked.

07:10

Just like that. Great. So now we can just focus on working on this middle sketch, on this middle part, and the other two parts on either side of it will update. And the thing that I was concerned about was this extra little protrusion here. And we can address that by making a few adjustments to the model overall. So let's take a look at this sketch that we were working on here.

07:35

click into it. And this center circle here was never dimensioned. We're going to make that 5 millimeters. And it makes it seem like this 15 millimeters is a little excessive. So we're just going to reduce that just by a little bit. 14 millimeters there. Everything updates nicely. The other thing I can do here is I can offset these surfaces a little bit since it's not going to be that critical to the overall dimension of the part.

08:02

So we're going to make that a 1 millimeter dimension there. And I'm also going to come over here and I can reduce this back dimension to 1.5. It's actually better if you do a multiple of your 3D printer. So usually you're printing at a 0.4 millimeter. So if we did 1.2, that would be a three layer difference. That looks pretty good right there. So with that.

08:31

we can do a boolean to really try to get the hole into this clip here so that these three tines fit through. I'm going to double click on the model. I'm going to do a subtraction of these three components. I'm going to make sure that I keep those components, the removed bodies, and from there I can just click check. And if I just hide these three, we should have a hole.

09:01

we just need to make sure that that hole goes all the way through the part so that we can slide the tines through the bottom. So at this point I am just going to do a quick extrusion. I'm going to type E and I'm going to drag this through and that should complete that. If I come to my extrusion I just want to really quickly click through all just in case. But otherwise that looks pretty good.

09:30

Now to take my bodies and I bring them back in, we see that we have them back in place and everything looks like it would fit really nicely. At this point, we've completed the additional modeling that we set out for this model and we've finished updating all of the various components that needed adjustment based on our 3D printing experiments. The next step here is to output this model.

09:59

and to check how our fit and finish has improved. In the next video, we'll take a look at how Shapr3D has included a bunch of ways to export 3D models, not just to 3D printers, but to other CAD systems, as well as providing tools for sharing and working on those models in Teams, and being able to publish those models to the web.

10:22

Thanks for following along. See you next time.