Transcript:
Let’s take a look at how to create this 3d printable box with the sliding dovetail lid. Hey, there, it’s! Kevin Kennedy and welcome to episode number seven of practical prints, a Youtube series where I show you how to design 3d printable objects in fusion 360 This box, with a simple dovetail lid can serve as the perfect storage container for a variety of objects with user parameters. We can set up the box. You can easily change the dimensions to fit a deck of cards. SD cards or really any other objects that you want to stow to get started. Let’s create a new component for the box. Remember the use of components will group all the relevant sketches and bodies will eventually create a second component for the lid and apply a sliding joint so components are required to create the box. We can start with a primitive box shape while in the solid modeling tab. We’ll find the box command in the create drop-down. We’ll select our. XY origin plane is the plane to sketch on, and then we’ll follow the best practice of starting our sketch from the origin point that will ensure that we have a fully constrained sketch. Let’s set the width of the box to 50 millimeters and the length to 80 millimeters after clicking well set the height to 40 millimeters and well click. OK, now that we have a solid box, We’ll want to make the Box hollow. Well, then cut away the top portion, where the lid goes and consider clearance for the lid as we make it a 3d body afterward, we’ll take a look at creating parameters so the model can adapt to your needs to make the box hollow. We’ll use the shell command. We’ll need to select the top face of our body and type out a thickness again. We’ll make this thickness a parameter as well, but for now. I’ll use four millimeters. These initial dimensions are what I use for the test prints that you saw at the beginning of the video. Notice how the shell command will hollow out all the inner material of our solid body, leaving only the 4 millimeter thickness as the walls were now ready to create a slot on the front face, which will allow the lid to slide back and forth right-click on the front face and select create sketch because we want this model to be dynamic. We’re going to project the outer edges. This will make it easier for us to fully constrain our sketches, ensuring that our model is truly adaptable. We can find the project command under the create drop-down and then the project slash include folder. Otherwise, you’ll see that we can activate it with the keyboard shortcut letter. P As in papa, we can click in the middle of the rectangle, which will project all four edge lines to our current sketch. You’ll see that the projected geometry is defined with the color purple. We’ll also want to project the inside edge lines notice how their points are projected based on where I’m selecting. This will help us define the dovetail angles, so they adapt based on the thickness of our shell command. Let’s use the line command to start a line from the projected point on the right. We’ll draw a line at a 55 degree angle. Remember, you can always hit the tab key to toggle between input fields for the length. We’ll use four millimeters, which is the thickness of our box and we’ll eventually change it to a thickness parameter to make things easier. I’m going to make half of the dovetail shape and mirror it over to the left. We’ll want to make sure that we have this half fully constrained before we mirror it looking at our sketch in the browser, we don’t have that fully constrained block icon. You’ll notice we have a point in the upper right that is not constrained which was caused by our angle dimension. We can select the point and then the corner point and add a coincident constraint, which should take care of this. Let’s now. Create a line running directly down the middle. We’ll make sure to start the line where it snaps at the midpoint constraint, ensuring that it’s always in the middle of our box. We also want to make sure the length matches the length of our angled line, so we’ll utilize constraints after we click to place the line hit the Escape key to clear all commands, and then I’ll shift-click the endpoints of each line and select the horizontal constraint in the toolbar, which will force them to stay at the same height because this middle line is just for the mere command. We’ll select it and turn it into a construction line. Lastly, we’ll use the line command to connect the two end points, which finishes off half of our dovetail lid using the sketch mere command from the toolbar. We can select the two lines as the objects to mirror and for the mere line, we’ll select our construction line to cut away This slot will use the extrude command. We’ll want to select the trapezoid as the profile we’ll also want to set the extend type as to object, this will allow us to select the back inside face of the box, ensuring that our cutout always runs the length of the box when we click. OK, you’ll see that we have a nice ledge for the lid to rest on. We’ve also created this dovetail at 55 degrees, which means we won’t need to use support material as each print layer will step out a little bit more. Our dovetail cutout sketch is still fully constrained. So in theory, this should adapt to our box if the dimensions change before we create the lid, Let’s just check that it’s working as expected double-clicking on the box feature, we can simply drag the width directional arrow to the right followed by the. OK, Button notice how everything adapts as we expect it and we can undo this change for now. We’re now ready to create another new component that will name lid. Remember that we have the box component active that means if we click. OK, this lid component will be nested underneath the box component. We’ll need to click the X to clear out the parent selection. We can then select the top-level assembly in the browser. The list component will now be placed on the same level as our box component when we click. OK, to keep this model dynamic. We’ll want to project our current cutout shape to a sketch on the front plane. Well then offset that projection to factor in our clearance, so the lid can slide in the actual 3d print. Let’s create a new sketch on the front plane of the box. I’ll activate the project command with the shortcut letter. P as in Papa. Well, then select all four of the lines that make up the trapezoid. We’ll, now use the offset sketch command in the toolbar. This offset will serve as the clearance between the box and the lid after a few test prints. I found that 0.25 millimeters worked well with my printer. However, you’ll have to test yours and adjust things, according to your printer’s nozzle size and how calibrated your printer is we’ll want to select only the bottom projection, which we’ll select as one object with the chain selection option checked. You’ll also want to make sure your offset is on the inside of the box. If not, you’ll want to flip it if we zoom in closely, you’ll see one issue. Is that our offset angled lines? Don’t touch the top! This is an issue as we want to connect these lines. If we extend the lines, it will break our offset relationship so to get around this. Let’s go ahead and include the top two edges of the model to our offset geometry. The diagonal lines now extend past the top of the box with the line tool we can connect the two angled lines by running a line straight across. You’ll just want to make sure that they snap into place where the projected line and offset lines intersect once the line is complete. We should still have a fully constrained sketch. One quick thing to point out. You’ll see that anytime you use the offset sketch feature, it will place the offset icon next to the sketch lines. If you double click on the icon or right-click on the icon and select edit offset, you’ll find that at any time we can go back and edit the offset with a solid extrude command. We can run this profile to the back inside wall of the box. Just as we did with the cutout, Remember the extent type needs to be set to the two object option before we can select the back wall. We’ll also want to consider our clearance here as well so we can add point two five millimeters to the offset. We can then click, okay. I printed the lid in the box separately. So one thing that I didn’t include in this Initial design is a way to keep the lid from sliding completely out of the box. I’m interested to hear from you guys. So if you have any ideas on how to make the lid printable as a separate part, but to where the lid could be stopped at the end of the box, then let me know by commenting your ideas down below now that our box is near complete, let’s set up some user parameters and some of my tutorials. I start by creating the parameters first. However, I wanted to show you that you can create user parameters at any time by referencing the model parameters. Let’s first activate the top-level assembly, so the entire model is visible. You’ll need to activate the parameters dialog from the modified drop-down in the dialogue. You’ll see that we have a section called model parameters. This represents any dimension values that we currently have in our model. The great thing about this dialog is that we can create new user parameter names and we can then replace the dimension values. All right here without leaving the dialog. I’ll create a new parameter named length and I’ll set it to 80 millimeters. We can then click on the 80 millimeter box expression and we can change it to the length parameter. I’ll follow the same process for the width and height as well you. After our length width and height are complete, we’ll want to set up a parameter for the thickness. The thickness parameter will be set to 4 millimeters remember that our thickness parameter was not only used for the she’ll feature, but we also use that same four millimeter value for the angled line in our dovetail sketch. You’ll want to replace that expression as well. I also want to point out that our extrude values are set to zero millimeters since we use the two object extent type. You can change this to the length parameter minus the thickness parameter, but note that you’ll then have to go back to change the extent type in the extrude feature. Lastly, let’s create a user parameter for the clearance that we set to 0.25 millimeters. We can then take that parameter and replace the two clearance expressions that we defined in our lid. Let’s now test our user parameters by changing the box dimensions to better suit a deck of cards in the parameters dialog. I’ll change the length to 40 millimeters the width to 74 millimeters and the height to 100 millimeters. You should find that everything adapts correctly as long as your sketches were fully constrained and as long as you updated each expression value with the correct parameters, Let’s now add a small divot in the lid, which will make it easier to slide open. I’ll make sure the lid component is active and then we’ll create a new sketch on the front of the lid. Now there are several ways that you can create a divot on the top. And I encourage you to explore them. But for my demo box, I simply sketched out an ellipse from the midpoint. I’ll set the width to 15 millimeters for the height. I’ll set mine to two millimeters. However, you can also use the thickness parameter divided by two or some other expression value to make it dependent on the thickness of your box. Well, then use the extrude command to cut this away in the extrude dialogue. We’ll need to change the start option to the offset plane. This will let us start. This extrude cut a specified offset distance away from our sketch. We’ll set the offset distance to negative 10 millimeters, making sure the operation is set to cut. Well also want to define the distance of five millimeters in length. This could also be changed to whatever suits your needs. I just found that this was a nice little slot. That made it a little bit easier to slide the lid open. Lastly, we can add a sliding join to the model to animate the lid first activate the top level components because our lid was built in place. We’ll want to use the as-built joint feature. Change the motion type to the slider option and then select both the lid and the box for the position. We can hide the lid component and select the top edge that the lid slides on we’ll also want to set the slide to the y-axi’s, which corresponds to the direction and the viewcube. You’ll see that the joint animation shows the lid running through the box to fix this. We can add joint limits after clicking, okay, we can right-click on the sliding joint icon where you’ll see the. Edit joint limits option. We can turn on the minimum and maximum and then drag out the first slider icon. You’ll see it adds a value to the maximum input. We can have the Max set to anything over 40 which will ensure that the lid comes completely off. We’ll want the minimum input to be set to zero so the joint stops when the lid is back in the original position. Lastly, we can hit the animate button to check out the joint limits in action. I hope you’ve enjoyed episode number 7 a practical Prince. This demo file from this tutorial is only available to my patreon supporter’s special. Thanks to you, vol. Jeff Dave, John David and Sam, who joined my patreon in the last week and thanks to Lok in the anonymous supporters who bought me coffee if you’ve learned something and enjoyed this tutorial, then hit that like button. If you’re not subscribed yet, well, then subscribe or don’t. Subscribe, it’s your decision. If you want to miss out on the new content and of course, you can click that playlist in the lower right hand corner to view the other tutorials from this series.