Hit CTRL-B and you’ll be able to set the radius of the bevel with your mouse and the number of segments of the bevel with the scroll wheel. In Edit mode, select one of the outside corners of our new flange. That’s not a problem, though, because the Bevel tool exists. That looks just about right for the first flange, but we’re missing the radii on a few corners. After that it’s a simple matter of doing another Boolean operation (this time ‘Union’) and making something that looks something like this: The left hand toolbar will allow you to move and scale this cube into something resembling the larger flange on our ‘thing’. To create the flange that’s 2 3/4″ wide, Add a cube mesh in object mode and play around with the Scale (hotkey ‘S’) and translate tools. Our thing has two flanges coming off the ‘washer with the slot’ we just made. There are still a few holes in this mesh, but we can fix those later. After deleting a whole bunch of faces and edges, and creating the ‘inside’ of our 3/8″ slot, we get something that looks like this: Also, the Subtract operation doesn’t put in the missing faces we’ll see once we subtract out the cube. Each Boolean operation only divides up faces and edges, meaning you need to go in and manually delete all the extraneous edges after the operation. In Blender, you can do Boolean operations like Union, Subtract, and Intersect. Select Boolean and you’ll see something that looks like the pic to the right. Now we’re going to subtract the cube from the cylinder using a modifier.Ĭlick on the little wrench icon seen above and select Add Modifier. It doesn’t really matter how far, because now we’re going to do something amazing: Boolean operations.īy this point you should have two objects in your top right hand toolbar: A cube and a cylinder. Using the extrude command (hotkey ‘E’), pull one face of the cube through our washer/cylinder. You should end up with something like the pic to the left. Then rotate it 45 degrees around the Z axis. With the rotate and scale commands on the right hand toolbar, manually set your cube to be 3/8″ in the X and Y axes, and 7/16″ in the Z axis. The first order of business is going into object mode and creating a cube with Add -> Mesh -> Cube on the top menu. Not too bad, and we can do these piecemeal. Build the mounting bracket with the countersunk hole.There are a few things we need to do before this ‘thing’ is done though: It’s basically just a washer, but the dimensions are correct for the thing we’re making. To the right is where we left off with the last part of this tutorial. With all the introductory stuff out of the way, it’s time to finish the job. In the first part of this tutorial, we took a look at the idea behind Blender – mesh editing – and how to interact with vertices, edges, and faces to make a thing. Need a part for a mechanical device? Don’t use Blender. Want to model some Greek and Roman statuaries? Blender is a great tool. Want to print out a plastic tree? Blender is a great tool. Blender is a tool for organic and sculptural forms. If you want to make precise mechanical parts, don’t use Blender. In the first part of this tutorial, I said using Blender to create a simple mechanical object like our ‘thing’ is akin to using a bulldozer to build a sandcastle. The Curse of Blender & What We’ve Done So Far It serves our purpose, though: a template with which to make something with a 3D CAD package.īy the way, if anyone out there has a 1st edition of Engineering Drawing, I’d love to see if this object actually goes all the way back to the 1911 volume. Yep, it’s an 85-year-old drawing with fractional inches. It’s taken out of the 4th edition of Engineering Drawing (French, 1929, p. To the right is the ‘thing’ we’re making for all these 3D Printering tutorials. Check out the rest of the tutorial below. We’ve already done half the work to make a ‘thing’ in Blender, so now it’s time to finish the job. Here’s some links to those other ‘Making a Thing’ posts: Previously, we’ve made the same part in other 3D design packages. In this post, we’re continuing our previous misadventures with Blender by making a ‘thing’ torn from a very old book on drafting. That’s a problem if you don’t know how to create and edit 3D objects. So you have a 3D printer and need to print something of your own design.
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