precision tolerances for 3d printed threads and bolts what's up I'm Jonathan
and welcome to Maker tails where I'm sharing my maker journey to help you go
further in yours so don't forget subscribe and hit that little bell icon
to never miss an opportunity keep making this video is all about answering a
question that I get asked quite a bit in my blender precision series in the
offset video which is how would I go about offsetting a nut and bolt for 3d
printing so that it works perfectly I've been asked a couple of times about this
question of how to do screw holes for bolts so this includes how to do a
threaded insert on top of that here still point X which was the first person
to ask also ask how would it go about creating an already existing hole if you
had a thread into a bolt or something to screw into here so let me go ahead and
show you both how to create the bolts that fit in with 3d print tolerances and
also how to go about creating a bolt from just the threads that you're given
first and foremost the simplest way of creating a bolt is by using an add-on
that is shipped with blender so if you go into the Preferences add-ons type in
bolt you will have a bolt factory so then with that you just go shift a
inside of mesh you have bolt and this lets you create nuts and bolts and
there's a lovely preset here so you can pick which bolt it is so if you have a
3d object that already has a thread in it and you know what that thread
correlates with it's as easy as that you've got it here now let's go ahead
and put a nut on here so how would you go about adding the simplest way a
tolerance for a 3d print from this well you would change it here keep in mind
that the major is the outer part of a bolt so it's the outer part here of a
nut and the Minor is the inner part here of a nut I know that for my 3d printer I
am ten point two millimeter offset and on diameter I'm going to actually use
the mathematical so I'm going to go plus zero point 2
- and that there is a nut that would be 3d printable to work with m ten bolts
on my 3d printer alternatively if you already have your bolts that you're
wanting to make and let's say this was some other very large object that needed
a certain thread placed in it well we'd know something that would cut away a
thread so I'm just gonna do a duplication here place it back on here
I'm gonna move this on the Z now by 40 downwards so that puts it perfectly in
place face to face to my object now what I want to do here is just cut away do a
ball so I'm gonna select my nut and let's go ahead and go control - and
there we have a bool operation now we have some intersecting faces here so
let's just go ahead and move this bolt up on the Z by 0.001 and that will sort
that out fantastically alright so there we have it that's our thread placed in
but now how would we go about doing our offset well the great thing is is two
things we have now because this is a bool operation we have our operator or
cutaway can be moved wherever we want this hole to be now on top of that
because it is a cut operate and the cut operator is a 3d object we can now use
our lovely modifier of the solidify like we used in the offset videos so let's go
ahead add the solidify and now this time you'll see we've got the solidify we've
got to make sure that it is only the rim instead of minus one we're gonna go +1
to expand our 3d cutting object there are gonna make sure that we have even
thickness and high-quality normals the thickness that I'm going for here is 0.2
and that there is what I'm wanting to get now of course my cutting object
has the head of this bolt so we've got it quickly go into edit mode with this
bolt we're gonna select it just the top half so let's go ahead I'm gonna hit
forward slash to isolate just this one here I'm now gonna go into vertex select
select that top vertex here if it will let me come on there we go and now I'm
just gonna do my ctrl + on the numpad to increase my selection till I'm all the
way down to the base of where the thread starts then I'm just going to quickly go
g-z move this up so it no longer intersects with the face then I want to
do my forward slash once again to show everything go out of edit mode make sure
that I'm outside of my wireframe x-ray view and there we go that's our now our
thread placed with an offset now my this is by far is my favorite way of doing it
because if all of a sudden I'm using a different material and the thickness or
the offset of my thread needs to be changed
I can change it right here by just changing the amount right here which is
fantastic for me this works the best so zero point two so that there is how to
create a thread itself now let's get on to still point X's question so here we
have pretty much the exact scenario that Stillpoint x had for us so here we
have a thread that's placed in a cube that we can see right there and we're
wanting to get a bolt out of this thread so let's go ahead and do that let's go
into our edit mode and let's say that this was a much more complicated object
so it's a pain to delete everything so let's go ahead and do our face selection
let's select these bottom faces down here and now let's just go control pod +
and select all the way up this thread fantastic now let's go ahead and go
control pad - so now we have adjust the thread and double checking that we have
everything selected so it looks like we have to
select a couple more things here can we use my c for circle select and select
what's left to be selected here and just in case I want over select unselect that
Andry select all that edge to double-check that I have everything it
looks like right here as well and that looks like everything is selected so now
that we have that selected now what I'm going to go is just go shift D to
duplicate it out go Z to move it out and now we have a complete and exact copy of
our thread so let's go ahead and hit P to part this out by selection so now we
have this object here of the thread itself now let's just hit point to focus
this interview let's go back into our edit mode and just very quickly let's
create some sort of handle for this so let's go ahead and let's do our two for
edge select and let's make sure we select our edge right here so let's go
yeah making sure we got the right edge go alt click to select that path
fantastic and just to make life a little bit easier what I'm going to do is go F
to fill it and we're going to work from here on out so let's go ahead let's
select this face let's extrude it out so right this minute we're creating the
shaft of the bolt itself so let's give it let's be precise about this let's say
we were wanting this shaft to be 0.25 to sounds like a reasonable amount so the
other direction 0.25 fantastic now I'm gonna e to extrude this out I want the
head of this to be let's say 5 millimeters fantastic now I'm going to
do my circle selection around here I'm going to go with alt E and we're going
to extrude here we go extrude along normal
and we're gonna extrude this lovely weird bolt nut out now of course we
could change this through some other completely different shape and just for
the sake of it let's just say that that's it
because I want to make my life pretty easy but of course you just go ahead and
remodel this to any shape you're wanting this nut to be or you can even go ahead
and create a different object so using modeling and then using the bool tool to
connect those two objects together okay so now we have our nut sorry now we have
our bolt here and our thread down there now we already know how to go about and
change this here using our modifier of solidify however that would affect sort
of like the entire object now we also know about vertex groups so you could do
this by a vertex group so let's do this but instead of doing it to the inner
thread here let's say for some reason we want this thread to be unchanged
we're only wanting this to be changed okay so let's work with just this so
let's first go ahead and create a vertex group so clicking into the object and
let's make sure that we select what we're wanting to select so plus numpad +
go all the way up this thread let's actually let's do this a different way
it's selected all here so all selected now let's use our circle select -
deselect the top bit make sure that if we go into x-ray as well this way around
circle select and this way we can deselect all of this all in one go
fantastic that works for me and there we have it pretty actually know what let me
deselects this last circle event as well so let's view from down below
let's hit 5 to change from perspective to orthographic and now let's use our
circle select and middle click to deselect all of this and
now we're left with just the threading so to speak it's in five on the numpad
once again so remember if you have a laptop you're going to have to use the
emulator for that and now let's treat the vertex group so
into our vertex groups vertex group plus let's call this bolt thread so with that
bolt thread now created let's assign the selection to that and it's as easy as
that so now that we have that done let's go
back into our object mode select our thread here and let's go into a modifier
add a modifier at our solidify and look lo and behold our solidify ur has our
vertex group option right here so let's click that hit bolt thread so now it's
only only going to change the thickness of our bolt thread now of course my 3d
printer prints things out too big so I need to go the other way around here so
let's go ahead with that selected we're gonna go - offset we're gonna go even
thickness original only rim make sure that this is making things smaller which
it is fantastic let's just go ahead and flip our normals so things are working
their way they should be working let me just double check that I'm doing this
right which apparently I'm not here I'm making things bigger there you go the
other way so we're not flipping normals we just double check that yeah that's
how I'm wanting it so what we're gonna go is minus 0.2 and that has now created
the thread that I can 3d print with the offset of my 3d printer to fit into a
thread that I did not have the bolt for before so I hope that helps you guys out
and this pretty much works for anything be it for threads be it for other
objects be it for a weird-shaped thing that you're trying to put in using the
solidify tool to create these offsets you a parametric way of doing this now
if you don't want to deal with all this and being exactly precisely accurate
there is a little bit of a rougher cheats way so to speak but there is
nowhere near as much precision so to do that let's say we're wanting to change
this thread to be just that teeny little bit bigger
well to do that offset we'll go ahead click into this go into our edit mode
once again let's select our thread once again here so let's go ahead and do that
and let's select it all up
fantastic now I'm gonna just deselect what we're not needing here why is it
not doing it now whoops let's just make this easier circle select select that
all here deselect the top there we go make sure that we've caught everything
and because I wasn't an x-ray I didn't catch everything so select it all up
deselect these outer ones now and now what you can do is the quickest way but
really you lose a lot of accuracy here is by just making sure that we're on
individual origins or medium point probably medium points going to be the
way we're wanting to go here hitting s for the scale and this lets you scale
now of course this gives us a problem let me just go undo if we were to scale
this up from this angle you'll see that it's scaling it upwards as well it looks
like I have something selected underneath let me just double check that
what's being selected oh this face so how would I go about constraining that
now I have shown you this before but just as a reminder so let's go ahead and
hit s for scaling so we're scaling this here now we are not wanting the
to scale in the z-axis so let's go ahead and hit shift Z and that isolates Z out
of the equation so now we only are scaling in the X and the y so now we can
go ahead and put in a scale offset amount let's go for one point I don't
know completely ballpark let's go one point two this is going to obviously be
far too big but that there would then offset your scaling so to speak offset
this thread outwards but as I've said before my preferred method is to use the
solidify because that really gives you millimeter accuracy to the highest
degree you can possibly control and that's how to go about doing tolerances
for nuts and bolts and 3d printing and blender and really it turns perfectly as
you can see is just using solidify a little bit differently
now if you've made it this far I think you're worth a little extra tip which is
if you are going to go about doing 3d printed bolts maybe consider doing them
this way instead so you can print them flat now the reason why you do this is
that means that the layer lines are going this way on the bolt which makes
them a lot stronger to pull forces and they work just the same with the nut and
you have it works just the same with the pull wise anyway I hope you enjoy this a
huge thank you to my patrons you guys are awesome and if you think I'm worthy
of your support I'd love to see you there too thanks for watching keep
making and let the quest continue