Do you have a 3D printer and a wobbly garden fence and want to easily design a fastener for it in 3 minutes? I’ll explain how to do it simply in a free design tool FreeCAD.
See the video about it on YouTube.
I have a garden fence which wobbles a lot if you touch it and makes awful noises. It is fastened with 2 fasteners on each side. More would solve the problem.
Well as a handy man, I designed and printed them myself…
Before the actual design in FreeCAD, we have to do some measurements. We need the info about the connection between the fence and the pillar.
We need inner pillar width and measurements of the fence alignment. The measurements in my case are: inner pillar width is 40mm, depth around 22mm, fence distance is 6,5mm and fence rod diameter 6,5mm.
Before we start, I have already drawn the fastener, and I will let it print during this video. I selected 20% infill and 0.3mm layer height. Fast print.
Let’s start designing from scratch.
Create new empty project. Go to PART DESIGN section, select CREATE SKETCH function, leave X-Y plane, click OK.
We will draw a shape with POLYLINE TOOL.
Draw a basic skeleton. I decided to make a little inner arc instead of square angles. Join points of arc and our skeleton.
I always move one point to 0 coordinate.
I suggest constraining from one way to the other. Fence rod starts at 6,5mm. The depth will be around 9mm. Now we will align the arc.
We can set the arc diameter, or we can set the width of cranny. I measured the fence rod 6,5mm.
I like my designs to be transparent.
Depth in the pillar is around 22mm, we will set it to 21,9mm. We do not want it to stick out.
Pillar width is 40mm. We want our fastener to be tight.
One more constraint to be set. We will define bottom width. Same as upper.
We have a fully constrained sketch. Close design.
Now let’s make it 3D with PAD TOOL. 10mm is not needed, so we will select 5mm.
We can see the result. Zoom with mouse rolling button, turn the object around with shift button + right mouse button.
We can make it better. Current design will consume too much filament. A hole in the body will save it, let’s make it. Toggle view.
We will draw a circle and constrain it with the bottom point.
11mm will put it in the centre. 13mm from the bottom too. Radius of 8mm will give us 2mm edge on both sides.
Again, a fully constrained sketch. Close design. Toggle view.
Et voila. Design is finished.
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Well, inbetween, the print has finished. Let it cool down for a moment.
It surely isn’t the best looking print, but I chose fast versus precise print.
ABOUT
We will see how to do a simple design of a fastener for the fence Ograje Kočevar with an open-source tool FreeCAD.
The fence is high quality, assembly was fluent and without problems. The only problem I have encountered, it wobbles a lot if you touch it and makes awful noise. They fastened it with 2 fasteners on each side. I wanted more fasteners, but they would not sell me more.
We will draw the sketch. Inbetween the 3D printer will print one – 3D printer in action, 3D printer time lapse.
It’s a FreeCAD tutorial / FreeCAD tutorials for beginners.
Song in the background: Alumo – That positive feeling, YouTube.