I’m Sam, a 3D designer who’s been working with custom designs and creative projects for a while now. I’m excited to start something new here in the 3D PRINTING SPACE community, a Weekly Community Design Challenge!
Here’s the idea:
Each week, we’ll focus on one 3D printed design concept suggested or inspired by our members. We’ll work together to refine the idea, share feedback, and bring it to life in 3D. If possible, I’ll set up a poll so we can all vote on which concept to work on for the week.
The goal is to:
Collaborate and share creativity
Learn from each other’s perspectives
End up with fun, unique 3D models that the whole community had a hand in shaping
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about starting this up? And if you’ve got an idea for the first community design, drop it in the comments!
Let’s make this something we all look forward to every week!
Great idea, I like the idea of collaboration. My CAD skills aren’t the greatest though, and as soon as I learn something new in Freecad, I forget something else - it’s an age thing I’m sure!
I am not a huge fan of markerworld. They changed the way they handle IP last year, but they do not have a good track record for end user rights. Plus all the hoops to actually download is a PITA. Printables is a more friendly user experience.
Personally most of my designs are driver by need. I need a part for this specific thing.
I would suggest a small scalable easy to print knob. It is something that I personally mess with all the time and have not come up with a useful one.
How do you propose we collaborate here? Can we choose what design format to use?
A scalable knob sounds really interesting! Feel free to share a quick sketch here and I’ll turn it into a 3D model. We can explore a few ideas and create something together.
This is something I tossed together. It is a simple design, thought really. I considered that scalable and editable means likely a slicer. Anyone should be able to scale it in a slicer and add a hole for either a screw, bolt, or insert can be done with a negative volume in a slicer too. It might have issues with the knurling as it scales, slicer settings dependant.
I created this knob for a specific application. It is made to have a 1/4-20 hex cap bolt go through it and the recess on top was for a printed logo insert. Scaling this may be problematic as the hex cap size for the bolt my not work when scaled. It would have to be redrawn with parametric values added in Fusion360 for it to work.
Interesting project… I’ve used this OpenScad file from Printables to make replacements for our Kitchen range hood, and they’re stronger than the orignal injection style ones. The file lets you make quite a number of adjustments. Printables - Replacement Camp Chef knob
I haven’t used Openscad but having look at it it seems to be incredibly tedious way to draw up something compared to solid model CAD software that is available for free theses days. Am I missing something about it.
If you have the ‘engine’ installed, and you load the file, it provides a menu of variables that let you modify the size, shape, rotational angle of the D shaped socket, etc. At least in this case. It’s not a bad way to provide a very scalable, parametic file, that lets you see in near realtime what you are doing tonthe model. It’s not really harder to use than modt slicers, and to a person with a scripting background, it’s actually a bit easier to gonin and adjust.
I did exactly that to another openscad box design and adjusted how many rows of text it printed on the sliding lid ( and improved it’s handling of punctuation to make my fav. language geek happy.
