I am impressed and Her indoors approves :)

I bought the CTC printer early 2015, £400 off ebay. With most of my toys that i buy the missus usually just says more junk. But with the 3D printer she is actually impressed by the items i have made.

Along with the usual silly items, a TARDIS and cyberman miniature etc I have also made useful stuff. Clips and brackets for various items around the house.

Still amazing to watch the part grow from the table.

Creating 3D objects is sometimes a little nightmare. I try and use freecad and create the parts from joining basic shapes. But its a bit buggy or I am useless?

I wanted a retangular block with a series of holes. Easy peasy? NO...

Create the block simples. Create a cylinder.. cut the cylinder shape from the block im good at this... Until the 2nd cylinder i cut that and it fills in the hole fore the first one??? Is it e or the software?

The plan is to print 3D parts and then cast them in aluminium... I built a furnace from a Gas cylinder, oddly all the neighbours stopped talking to me when i reeled out the extension lead and angle grinder and an old calor gas bottle. Funny people

I too have discovered the world of 3D printing. Have a Zortrax M200 myself. A little to closed source for my liking but the results are fantastic.

Download Fusion360. Extremely powerful 3D software along with excellent Youtube tutorials and best part is its free!

G.

Dave, it's not that they were not talking, it's just that they were so far away you couldn't hear them!

Dave

No, that was what I found so disappointing with Freecad. Perhaps in a few years they will have finished developing and debugging the features it will be almost usable. It may depend which features you are using but certainly when I tried to use it it was pretty much unusable.

Fusion 360 does (or will soon do) most things you could ever need for free, so give it a go!

Murray

Thanks, I will try fusion 360. Dont think i tried that.

I did get something else that was free 3D desk or something, it was packed full of features and even following a youtube video i struggled. They seemed able to select certains parts with just a click where i couldn't.

Had a play with Fusion 360 and it appears to be easier than 123D Design, although quite similar.

I managed to created a block with a dovetail groove and threaded holes. It wouldn't let me save it though?

Only option was to 3D print it where it sent it to Print Studio whjich just had a blank page and no item. Or to Meshmixer or Makerbot. Sent to Makerbot and the threaded holes were just plain holes.

Threads not transferred.

Must be doing something wrong?

Thanks for the tip.

Dave - in many 3D CAD systems threaded holes are not accurately modelled by the hole tool, there may be a dummy visual texture applied to give the impression of a thread, but it isn't actually part of the 3D model. Some CAD systems don't even bother with the dummy texture.

If you need the thread (e.g. for printing), you'll typically have to model it yourself as a helical feature.

Dave,

CAD - My preference is OnShape which I found to be immediately intuitive unlike many of the others available as free or not-so-free downloads. Its cloud based so a reasonable connection is necessary and it suffers from a visible slowing down from mid afternoon onwards as the US West Coast wakes up. Really good though and generates .stl files as a direct download for the entire object or for individual parts.

Threads - unless you are modelling large threads, don't bother to do anything more than a hole of roughly tapping size. For small threads in PLA (think up to say 4mm), just screw the bolt in, for larger ones, treat it as any other material and drop a tap through first.You can model threads if you need something complex though - I did a LH 45mm(?) square section internal thread as a connector for standard swimming pool floating tube. It took almost as long to remove the support material for the thread as it did to print but successful in the end. Needed to watch the tutorial on creating threads several times though!

Simon

Weird - no idea what the problem could be. Was the "save" option greyed out? Never had that problem. It's only greyed out in the example below because I haven't changed anything since the last save I did. Usually it will autosave periodically anyway and save at exit unless you tell it not to. You sure it hasn't kept your work?

STL is under "export" rather than save - how did you get to that?

The save option is in the pull down under the folder icon shown (or press Control S) and the recent data (projects) panel is displayed by clicking the 9 black squares. Here's an example:

Hope that helps!

Murray

Not so with Fusion 360. When defining or editing a thread feature, you can tick the "model feature" box and the thread will be created as a true helical path (see below). This is useful if you want to export to STL etc. Of course, if you want to use Fusion's rigid tapping or thread milling operations you can pick up the thread in CAM without modelling it.

For normal drawing purposes, the default is a cosmetic but non-modelled thread.

That's one area where Onshape is weak - last time I looked, they still wanted you to cut your own threads by doing a helical path and cut extruding a cutter along it. Ending the thread cleanly was a pain too. In comparison, Fusion is a dream - and you get the CAM stuff as well....

Edit - sorry, quoted the wrong reply!

Edited By Muzzer on 04/05/2016 10:58:41

How do i get an STL file? Export only shows f3d, igs, iges, sat, smt, stp and step. No STL option.

I tried offline mode and it saved the file as an f3d.

Yes the edit feature worked and the thread now transfers to the makerbot desktop. The only way to create an STL seems to be choose 3D print and then makerbot and then use makerbot to save the file.

Missing something?

Thanks.

Sorry, dunno. I haven't used F360 to create STL myself. When I had access to a 3D printer I was using Solidworks.

But it looks as if you can either right click on the part and select "save as STL" or go into the file menu and select "3D print". They seem to result in a similar dialog box. Don't see any mention of Makerbot myself although there are options to select a print utility (Print Studio or Meshmixer) and change mesh sizes etc. I'd paste a screenshot of what I can see but this forum is so clunky you have to upload JPGs, yet I have a live to live.

Murray

For clarification, what exactly is .stl? I'm sure i've used it before to translate images into g-code but i'm not sure where in the chain it fit.

Michael W

Let me Google that for you!

3D file used by 3D printers...

ah, stereolithography, it all makes sense now!

Michael W

Most of the software seems to handle STL files, some seem to have their own format.

I have a CTC makerbot clone and when you convert the STL file it creates an x3g file which appears to be a compressed file with the g-code.

Nothing seems to be able to read these files. Or i have not looked very hard

Sometimes it would be good to see what the x3g file is because something i rename them to display

better on the printer.