Impressed With 3D Printing

A little while ago it was mentioned on this forum that the draper 75 mm to 100 mm digital micrometres could be bought very cheaply from Amazon and Ebay. I bought myself one, and was very pleased with it.

Unfortunately, and in a clumsy ham fisted moment I turned the battery cover too tightly and broke off all the retaining tips. That means the battery kept following out. It was my own clumsy fault. I tried to glue the tips back on, but failed.

Last week I started learning the free CAD package fusion 360. My first project was to draw the battery clip. I saved the battery clip as an STL file, and got it printed at 3dhubs . com.

Two days later this arrived in the post.

It was a perfect fit!

Nice job and saves a fair bit of fiddly machining. I may try the CAD package, I bought a copy of Turbo Cad from Maplins but it was out of stock and so far they have failed to deliver so it looks like a money back job.

I’ve been very happy with Turbo Cad deluxe and for around £60 pounds you can’t really go too wrong. However, it has to be said that Fusion 360 leaves it standing for dust. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the low end CAD market as it’s hard to see how the budget CAD software can compete in either price or capability. I suspect Fusion 360 will be a game changer.

For turbocad try Paul the CAD ad over here-------------->

He will do it so you can download it an be up and running pretty quick.

Neil