Hi there, I'm Ross and this is Reinforced. You might have seen a video I posted on LinkedIn about
this part right here. Since posting, I've received tons of questions about the best practices for
modeling knurling in the 3D printing process - so I'm here to teach you. Let's dive into it.
Most of you watching that come from a manufacturing background probably already know
what knurling is, but for those of you that don't, allow me to define it. Knurling is a manufacturing
operation, typically performed on a lathe, to create a pattern by making a set of unique cuts
that adds a texture to the surface of an object, such as the parts on this table right here.
One of the most common use cases for knurling is to add grippage to an object. You've probably
seen it on a series of parts in your machine shop, such as this die wrench handle, or this threaded
knob. So why would I want a 3D print knurls over creating them with traditional manufacturing?
Traditional knurling requires specialized cutting tools and a unique skill set to do this operation
correctly, but the barriers to entry with 3D printing are significantly lower, and it starts
in CAD. We're going to be adding some knurls to the lower section of this keyed grip right
here so it's more ergonomically friendly to the technicians that use this tool every single day.
This key grip is a great application for the Metal X because it's low volume, trivially complex in
its design, and has certain custom features like this tool number and this mistake proof emboss.
If I want to incorporate these knurlings, it would require two
different manufacturing operations. Build on a CNC, and then turned on lathe. Alternatively,
the Metal X can hit all these design features in a single manufacturing process.
Today we're going to use Fusion360 as our CAD. Let's jump into it.
Now that we're in Fusion360, I have the bulk of my design already made and we're going to
add the knurling. I first wanted to find a plane that will show where the end point of
my knurling pattern should go. We're going to set this to 30 millimeters above the bottom.
Next we're going to use the coil. I'm going to start the sketch at the top portion and just
kind of roughly sketch the diamond because right here we can define it further as 25 millimeters.
We'll also set the height to 30 millimeters. Next we want to set the revolutions, and you have
a little bit of design freedom here, it really depends on the diameter and height of the sections
that you're adding this pattern to. And in this case a quarter revolution looks appropriate.
For the section, Fusion defaulted to triangular inner and that's what we'll use, a triangular cut.
The section size is an important thing with 3D printing, and I typically use
one millimeter depth because it requires no post processing or advanced settings.
If you need additional grippage you can increase the depth up to two millimeters,
however at this depth supports will be auto generated in the model. You can use our override
tools in Eiger to remove these supports prior to printing and avoid any extra post processing.
For more information on how to utilize support overrides, click the link up in the corner.
Now that we have this generated and it all looks good to me, I will confirm and make that cut
the second step is to mirror this step so I'm going to select the mirror tool I will select
the two faces of the cut and then I will select my symmetry plane which is located right here
it kind of creates this neat V pattern
the last step is to do a circular pattern this time I have four faces to select
and my Axis of Symmetry is just the center axis of the cylinder now we have a little bit of
design Freedom here the number of instances that we replicate if we go a low number like 15 the
size of these diamonds is going to be larger and the density will be more sparse if we go
higher like 50 it will have better grippage but we need to consider the limitations of printing and
something you want to consider here is that the width of these diamonds should be no smaller than
0.4 millimeters in this case I'm going to use a balance and select as 30 millimeters and of course
this is dependent on the diameter and height that we used so you can digitally iterate and decide
what is ideal for your use case I will confirm it and hit OK sometimes this can take a few seconds
as it's doing a lot of math in the background to generate this very unique pattern and there you
have it we're now ready to export this as an STL file slice it in our software and begin printing
let's recap what we just learned you can use just about any type of CAD tool to model knurls that
can be 3D printed in three simple operations first we use a coil with a one millimeter
triangular depth and cut that into the part we then mirror that across the Symmetry plane to
create an upside down v-shape and finally we circular pattern that v-shape with a certain
number of instances depending on your use case and how sparse or dense you want the pattern to be
hope you found this helpful and are ready to start incorporating knurling into your 3D brand designs
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