Remix of the Spaceman of the infamous DJ duo! The helmets were a bit tricky to make because they had somewhat organic shapes. It was a real learning curve to start to work with surfaces in Fusion360 in order to achieve the correct geometries that looked good.
A lot of surface and solid lofting to achieve the correct look
The helmets are a remix of what the real life ones should look on a round LEGO head.
This sketch was pretty fun to draw. A combination of solids and surface lofts.
Lofting is when you transition from one surface to another, or one curve to another to generate a new solid or surface. It’s like morphing 2 lines in 3D space. The most important part of that however is the guides or centerlines. That dictates how the surfaces blend together, otherwise you’re left with a pretty rigid transition.
Designing curves to tell Fusion how to transition from one profile to another is amazing!
This is just an exercise to sharpen my skills in Fusion. The goal was to practice re-creating specific bodies and joints. Learned a lot from doing this. There were a lot of dimensions that I simply assumed were parallel, when in fact there were subtle things that were off.
The arms were the hardest part of this build. Most of the other pieces were pretty parametric. The arms were a little organic and finding the right angles and dimensions was tricky.
Tricks
The outside thigh is not perpendicular to the foot/ground. In fact, there is a slight bow inwards, making the feet wider than the hips.
The face cutout for the helmet is not perpendicular so the shell of the helmet, which means you can not de-boss the cutout. In fact, you need to cut the opening directly from the left/right sides, making the edge of the cutout appear thicker than the actual thickness of the helmet.
The strap around neck (for the tanks on the back) are not a perfect U shape. In fact, the traps bow inwards towards the tank ever so slightly.
Given the properties of PLA, I designed the joints to take advantage of the slight flexibility of the plastic. The male part of the joints are segmented to provide some tolerance, and the female parts of the joints had filets to help guide the parts in to snap together. Once the piece is snapped in, chamfers on the male help to keep it gently in place and allow for some wiggle room.
Here is it printed just for testing purposes. Not for sale or distribution, relax.
I added tolerance in the designs of about 0.1mm to 0.2mm to the joints based on what I know about my 3D printer. However, I think those need to be removed because if I print a scaled version, the tolerance will scale with it, which doesn’t make sense because the accuracy of the printer doesn’t increase with the size.
There are many spool holders out there. The problem is there are many spool sizes that makes it hard to build a universal one that works well. I decided to make a spool holder that mounts horizontally and uses the weight of the spool itself to keep the spool in place.
This is version 7 of my design, it’s still in progress and was a good motion study for the joints in CAD. How will it work in practice? We’ll soon find out.
This year my goal is to focus on designing more complex assemblies that rely on gears, joints, or parts that leverage the flexibility of the material itself to its advantage as in compliant mechanisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliant_mechanism
Fusion 2 piece build of the part
This part is very specific to my sink, although I could probably rebuild this so the ring clips utilize the flexibility of the material to expand or contract allowing more generic fits.
It’s ugly, I know, but functional. The main exercise here for me was to design pieces that snap together, with the correct tolerances for my machine.
I bought some cheap adhesive hooks for the shower but the were poorly designed, flexed, and did not hold up enough weight. Amazon sells a 20 pack of suction cups which I got for a variety of projects so I created these durable hooks to go with them.
Here is the file to download. All the parameters of the suction cups are variables, so if you buy different ones, just enter your specific dimensions.
The design allows for the larger round part of the suction cup to slide in, then slide up unto the smaller diameter area at the top. The bottom of the hook features a mini extension exactly the thickness of the suction cup to keep the hook perfectly horizontal and also get the most leverage from the suction cup as well.
The best orientation to print this is sideways for the best strength.
Emma’s paint collection is getting pretty big. It was impractical to find colors in her basket, so I decided to create some parametric wall-mount removable paint racks to hold her Apple Barrel paint collection.
The Tools
Fusion 360
Lightburn
CO2 laser cutter
clamps
rubber bands
The Materials
5mm birch wood
wood glue
drywall screws
The Design
I wanted the racks to be easily removable so I made slots for the screws to easily go in at the ends of the rack. I initially made it to hold 12, but it ended up being too wide.
I would post the Lightburn/SVG/DXF files, however, the design is dependent on the thickness of the material. 1/4 inch MDF ranges from 5.5-6.3 mm. The birch I used was 5mm. Also, the laser kerf (thickness of the laser cut) even though small, may be different than your machine. To do it right, you really need to open the file in Fusion and save the sketches yourself after updating the parameters.
Initial design with handle for easy carrying
The design is completely parametric so the bottle diameter, height, count, and material thickness are all customizable so I can use this to hold anything else like paint cans, sauce bottles and spices, etc.
Didn’t have great clamps, rubber bands should do!
Birch wood seems to have a lot of ash when cut on the laser so I had to take a damp towel to clean off the edges otherwise the glue job is a complete mess.
Mistakes
The stock I used was slightly curved which caused distance issues with the laser’s focal point. Not a big deal, but I should add some weights next time to flatten out the stock
Rubber bands are not ideal for gluing things. After the initial prototype, I utilized some strategically placed clamps and the result was much better. Also, if the wood is slightly curved, I realized that you can use the curve to your advantage to put pressure on the connecting edges.
