Transcript:
Whoa, everyone, inventor. Seven one nine here and in today’s video. We are doing a fun little experiment to see if we can 3d print a key. I would like to quickly say that. This video was a suggestion from one of my subscribers who commented on one of my recent videos so as always. If you guys have a suggestion for a future video, please shoot it in the comments down below as I do, read all the comments and we’ll try and reply if I like it so anyway, let’s get to the video. So here’s some 2 lakhs. I had laying around were. Gonna start with this strong man lock so as you can see the metal key. Obviously it works very nicely so to make this key into a 3d replication, There’s a few steps that we’re gonna do so step. One here was to get the side profile of the key to get the main teeth design into my computer, so do that. I just use my phone to take a picture of it and I then emailed it to myself and as you can see what I have here on. The left is the picture. I just took it on my hand because it didn’t really matter, and then I imported the picture into Word to remove the background as they have a pretty good background moving tool with good tolerances. So as you can see right there, they’re all the teeth, all the teeth, and I double checked, and it’s pretty darn accurate, so now we’re gonna go ahead and import this into SolidWorks okay, so here. We are installed works now. I’m going to go ahead and create a sketch on the top plane, and then there’s a pretty cool tool under sketch tools. Sketch picture. So this is where I can go ahead and import a picture. I’m going to, of course, import the picture that we just made in Word as you can see there. It is right there, let me! I get it so you can see a little better. It’s hard to focus on the computer screen. Obviously, so there’s the picture right there now. I’m gonna go ahead and use some tools, there’s. The color tool is probably the easiest one for this, So you do the eyedropper, select the black background and begin trace, so it goes ahead and cuts it out, but as you can see, makes it a little bit rough around the edges, So I’m gonna go ahead and fix it up and then I’ll show you the end result. So if you do decide to do this, all I did was go down here to color tolerance. I know you can’t read that, but that’s what it says, and I’m gonna go ahead and turn the sensitivity way down and you can see it rounds on all the corners quite nicely, so now at the very bottom hit apply, and it’s going to turn that outline into an actual drawing, And if I is once it loads, it takes a few seconds to load, but I’m gonna go ahead and modify all the exact little points to make sure it’s the exact same as the key so here we have the basic outline of the key, but the issue is that it is not to scale so to scale. This thing what we’re going to do is take the key, and I measured an arbitrary point such as that flat, and I got to be just about point Six inches almost on the nose and then using the SolidWork’s evaluation tool, I measured this flat on the screen as sixteen point seven one three nine inches and by doing some quick math. What I found is that I need to scale it by point zero three, five, eight, nine nine times, so SolidWorks luckily has a scale feature. I really wish I could show you guys without this. Big glare here. But there it is essentially right there, so entities to scale what I’m gonna do is go ahead and select every single curvature on the key, just like that, and then I’m gonna go ahead and select a scale about corner and then the scale value. And we’re gonna hit copy and as you can see, there’s the actual key that I just made way down here, and that is what we’re going to be using for our extrusion next. What I’ve done is taken my calipers and measured the thickness of the key as point zero six one inches, and when typing that into the extrude as you can see, I just extruder the sketch to make the very first outline of our key in SolidWorks. Now the last thing I’ll do off screen is add the cutout at the side as you can see gets thicker right at the top and then we’re ready to 3d print there. We have it everybody, the final key design with a hole for the final touch as you can see. I added in the curvature as the real key has as well as all the teeth and the little slot. So I’ve done my best measuring up everything. It seems to be pretty accurate, so I say that as a DOT STL file which my 3d printer can read. I import it into the 3d printer right here in the little program. Very simple program and we’re going to go ahead and hit print and lets. Get it going, so there’s the key all 3d printed right there. That was actually the third iteration. The first two didn’t work out so hot, so I decided to do the bed, which makes it much nicer for the stuff on top, so let’s go take it off and clean her up, so I’m just gonna use an exacto knife to scrape the key and the backing off. So now as you can see, we have this key on the backing. Still, it’s kind of hard to show, but now it’s gonna very carefully scrape it off of the backing and make it all good so there we have it. Everyone, the final product. There’s the key separated from the raft so obviously. I don’t leave this anymore. And so essentially a quick side-by-side comparison. There’s the original obviously and here is mine. They are not identical as you can see. The cutouts are closed, not 100% the same, but very, very close. Now All I sought to do. I guess is test it, so the time we’ve all been waiting for, It is now time to test and just obviously the metal key slides right in and with a little bit of pressure, but not too much. It opens it very easily, obviously as it was designed to do so now my initial prediction is that this is not going to work. Unfortunately, because the thickness being point zero six of a inch is quite thin now first. Pla plastic as you can see just from me holding on to the tip and twisting it. It twists very easily, so fortunately. I think I’m going to end up here with a rock that will never be used again because the key will be stuck in it now. If the key did turn, there’s an okay chance it will work as the teeth are very similar. I’m not sure on the tolerances on this type of walk, but without further ado here we go with the testing first. Let’s see if the Kievan slides in and hearing ticking, It’s probably Mikey breaking, but, yep, the key is fully inserted seated on the brass and the moment we’ve all been waiting for. I’m going to try my best to get it to not break. Nope, there’s no way. I’m twisting it. It does go in and out, but I cannot get it to twist. I wish I could put something on that brass and help it out. Maybe I will, so I’ve got this flat-head screwdriver to try and help it out as best as it can by doing the rotating portion, Nope. I do not think we’re gonna have success here. I’ll keep going just in case, And if it breaks, it breaks here we go, alright. It’s not breaking, but it’s twisted more than I can explain, so I’m going to try and take it out before I break anything so might have been successful in pressing down the teeth, but it is too flimsy to work, so if you do need a secondary key, I recommend just using one of those 5-minute key makers, one-minute whatever and Walmart, so I hope you guys still enjoyed the design process of this video. So please give it a thumbs up. If you want to see more 3d printed stuff and let me know in the comments down below what you want to see as always, please like comment and subscribe, thanks for watching.