3D Printing and Prototype Development with Fusion 360

STEVEN SCHAIN: So I'd like to welcome everybody to the Fusion 360, 3D printing and prototype design using Fusion 360. This class, I know it's the afternoon. We'll try and be entertaining, if that's possible today in the afternoon. Thankfully, it's not Thursday afternoon. We'd all be sleeping by now. So my name is Steve Schain. I'm the post-production supervisor in media and entertainment content manager for 4D Technologies CAD Learning.

JERRY BERNS: I'm Jerry Berns, manufacturing content manager at 4D.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So what we're going to do is talk about-- got it. Can you click the mouse on there? Thank you. So, again, welcome. So what we're going to talk-- is this not on. There we go. It would help if it was on. We're going to talk about all things Fusion 360 and 3D printing as it relates to using Fusion 360 to iterate a design. So what you'll walk away with is, sort of, an understanding of where Fusion 360 fits into that prototype development process.

You'll see over the week a number of different processes. This is just one of many. So if you have any questions, again, hold until the end. We'll talk about how 3D printing can greatly accelerate your design process. Just a quick question, how many people use a 3D printer on a regular basis?

JERRY BERNS: Wow.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Wow. Last year it was about half that, and the year before there was literally-- have to stand back here I guess. Last year it was about half that, and the year before it, it was literally like one person. So in the span of three years we've gone from one person in the class to a good third of the class having direct access to a 3D printer. And then we'll also, sort of, cover the differences between design for manufacturing and design for 3D printing. And you'll hear, again, this is one of those things that varies from industry to industry, but there's, sort of, some constants.

One thing that I do want to let you guys know about is a promotion that we're doing through CAD learning. If you go to cadlearning.com/free30daytrial, you can enter into get a 30 day free trial, but you're entered when you enter that to win an M3D Micro 3D Printer. And it's a nice little hobby 3D printer. It's nothing special, but it's fun.

So why Fusion 360? How many people are using Fusion 360 right now? A couple of people. Why?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVEN SCHAIN: So you're using it as, sort of, an in-between? Ah, that's good. Somebody else? Anybody else.

AUDIENCE: I'm using it, because [INAUDIBLE] design program, which I was using. So this seemed that's the only thing.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yeah, so you're using it to replace 123D design?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVEN SCHAIN: It's a good replacement. A little bit more of a learning curve, but definitely a good replacement. Anybody else?

AUDIENCE: We have a research facility in Ontario, Canada, and we institute it into our community college. And [INAUDIBLE]. So the academic [INAUDIBLE] right now is currently inventor, so we've been using the research facility to de-risk Fusion 360 and then hopefully inject that back into the academic [INAUDIBLE].

STEVEN SCHAIN: Oh, great. So you're working on it to actually bring it into the academic side of things?

AUDIENCE: Right.

STEVEN SCHAIN: That's fantastic. So prototype development has come a long way over the last-- well, even five years, since the-- from the early days of 3D printing back in the early 90s, 3D printing was helping prototype parts. The first 3D print I ever did was back in 1992, '93, and it was a part for a tracking buoy that was dropped out of a helicopter. The part was about this big. It cost $1,100 and took two weeks to get back from the rapid prototyping center. But it was still a third of the price of getting it machine.

I look at that today, and I'm like I could do that on my printer home that I spent $1,100 on, you can use like $2 worth of material, so. So if we look at the traditional prototyping process, the traditional process is this large loop, right. And the main reason that loop is large is because of the prototype creation step in that process. Prototype creation step can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or even longer, depending on the kind of prototype.

So you'd be able to run through that a handful of times, three, four, maybe five times in the course of a year on a product. How many people are creating products? How many people are using prototyping in their regular workflow? So a few more than that. So 10 years ago, you get a product to market, and you would have three design iterations, four design iterations on that product. And if you think about what you can get done in those three or four design iterations, it's not a lot. You have one design iteration that, sort of, for fit, does it fit right.

Maybe the next one is form and function. Maybe you get to a point where you can prototype something for-- that you can do real testing on. Well, with real time or rapid prototyping or additive manufacturing or 3D printing, whatever it's called, it's all the same thing. But what it does is it doesn't change the process. The process is still the same process. You're iterating a part to get it better. What it does do is it takes that prototype development phase from weeks and brings it down to days or hours. And in most cases, even if you go with an online service, you can get something back 24 to 48 hours. So your prototype is now in your hands within a day or two.

If you have a printer on your desk or in your office and you can set it when you go home or give it to whoever's running the printer, then you come back in the morning and that prototype is there. You literally have zero downtime, right. So you leave at night at five o'clock. You come back in the morning, the prototype is ready for you to do something, whether you're assembling it, doing fit testing, giving it to people to make sure, hey, does this ergonomically fit well?

So by the time you get a product to market, you've had 10 to 100 times as many iterations of that product than previously. So what are some of the things that you gain from that, right? Think about the gains you get from being able to iterate something 100 times, as opposed to four. You have better quality. That's the number one thing you get out of it. You have fewer design flaws, because you can catch those much sooner. And in most cases, you just have a better product overall, right. You're able to do things that you would not have ever been able to do if you could only make four of them.

So all these incremental steps that you're doing, all these little changes you're making to the file add up over 100, 200, 300, sometimes 500 iterations of the product. So you get a much better product. So I asked this question, but how many people that are using 3D printing-- that are using 3D printers have them within direct access to your workstation, to where you work. So a handful of you. And what are you guys doing on them?

AUDIENCE: We're prototypes for our robots.

STEVEN SCHAIN: OK, so robot prototypes. I'm repeating everything, because we're being recorded and I just want to make sure that that gets-- that gets on there. Anybody else?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] like a, something that presents to managers, so this is what it would look like.

STEVEN SCHAIN: OK, so marketing or presentation parts.

AUDIENCE: But it depends on the printer. We have multiple printers at [INAUDIBLE] scale, so some of the smaller ones we do graphic iterations [INAUDIBLE]. The larger scales we do [INAUDIBLE].

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yeah, so rapid prototyping versus finished parts on some of the other ones. Yeah, so this just for those of you who may not be familiar with this. This is Fusion 3 design 400 3D printer. They're located in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it's a FDM fused deposition modeling style printer. It's essentially a computer controlled Glue gun, and it uses weed whacker line. So that's my description of 3D printers, well, FDM at least. And it's a light industrial 3D printer. It's very high quality. It's very fast and very reliable, so.

And that's a big difference in the last three years is not only the accessibility of really high quality durable 3D printers, but the quality of the part that they put out. So we'll look at a couple of other 3D printers later. So manufacturing versus 3D printing, I'm going to go through this a little quickly. But when you think of manufacturing, you think of, like, mass production, right, millions of parts, lots of widgets. When you think of 3D printing, you're really talking about prototypes, low run production.

There's printers that are coming out that are continuous production printers that are rapid production printers. There's a few new technologies that are coming out that are interesting. There's one that uses a laser beam splitter to make instead of one laser beam, thousands to make the parts. I think Avi from 3D Systems is working on that. The guy who was the president of #D systems. So material varieties, manufacturing whatever material you need to make it out of, you make it out of. There's no limits, right.

With 3D printing, you still have a limitation on the materials that you can use. With FDM, you can't use metals. You can use metallic filaments that are 80% to 90% metal, but you can't use a metal material. There is a material out there that you print with and then bake it to 1800 degrees and it fuses everything together so you have a metal part, but that's not the-- that's not the norm.

You have your diminishing parts or diminishing cost per part, right. When you're making a million widgets, what you pay for your tooling costs, right, what are the other costs involved. They drop rapidly. With 3D printing, because it takes the same amount of time, the same amount of material for every part, you're printing costs are flat, right. You estimate the cost, the first one is the same price as the last one.

The tooling-- let me get out of the way of that. The tooling is expensive, right. $10,000 for a mold is cheap. So if you're thinking about a mold, you're talking about making a mold, there's no tooling in 3D printing. You send a file to a printer and that's it and you're done. Also changes, how many people have run into this where you start a project and you get halfway through and all of a sudden there's change order that comes down, and you go that is going to cost a lot of money, right. Has anybody not ever run into that? Because I've never not run into that.

With 3D printing, changes, you have your incurred cost up to that point, right. So all you're sunk costs for whatever you've gotten to where that change is are what your, that's what you've lost. But you don't have to redo tooling, you don't have to remake molds, you don't have to do any machining. There's nothing you have to do. You just send a new file to the printer.

So this is just a really simple comparison in the graph. So when you have time versus cost, your time goes up, sort of, exponentially. It's, sort of, linear but exponential. You start out with a 1x. During design time any changes you make, they don't really affect the cost. Maybe they affect the cost of the created part, but that's it. When you get into prototyping, you've gone out, you've spent a few thousand dollars on a machine prototype. Nope, that doesn't work. You've got to go and make another one.

When you get into tooling and you've made a $40,000 mold, all of a sudden, you've got to scrap that mold and make a new one, that's a lot of money. And then when you get into production and you've made a million widgets and all the machining and production line has been set up to manufacture that part, think about all that cost. With 3D printing, while there are some costs involved, right-- if you make a million whatevers, it is it doesn't matter. If you to change it, you lose the money on those million whatevers-- with 3D printing, though, or additive manufacturing, the costs stay relatively flat throughout the whole process.

And the reason is you send a file to the printer, and you get the new part. There's nothing else you have to do. You guys agree with me on that, those who have you been using 3D printers? It's pretty-- a nice thing about it. The other thing about 3D printing that's cool, and this is where in our-- all the machine learning is going, especially with what is that? Dreamcatcher. Yeah, the crazy modeling manufacturing program that makes a million of whatever you're designing.

So Dreamcatcher is a great example of you can create things that can't be manufactured traditionally, right. So additive manufacturing is the way to go. And this is just an excerpt from the successful designer who looked and cried, at last, success is mine. It can't even be cast. So you have to be very aware of what you're making.

If you are making something that has to be manufactured traditionally, you need to, sort of, stick to those rules. If you're going to use additive manufacturing for your final production process, then you stick to those rules. There's still rules with additive manufacturing. You just can't do whatever you want. But you're much more free to do what you feel.

So the current project, I'm going to-- actually, can you hand these out?

JERRY BERNS: Yep.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So the current project and the prototype that we're going to talk about is-- I'm really into 3D printing. I have been for years, and I decided one day I was going to get this wild hair and assemble a 3D printer. So I bought Folgertech FT-5. I don't know if anybody is familiar with that, but it's a kit 3D printer. It's a 12 by 12 by 12 build area, and it's a traditional what's called just a Cartesian printer. It has just [INAUDIBLE] simple, right.

So I decided I'd assemble it, and this is the process of me assembling it. It took me about a month to put it together, and another three months to get it working right. And it's not that it was difficult to get working right. It's just when you work, you get, like, an hour a night. Maybe you get a Sunday afternoon, and you're like, woohoo, I got to work four hours on this thing. But this is the assembly process, and I've even made some upgrades, replaced steel bearings with ceramic that really made a big difference in print quality and added the part that we're going to be talking about today, which is the part cooler.

So with FDM printing, if you're not familiar with fuse deposition modeling, it squirts filament out of a hot printhead, right. Well, certain filaments need to be cooled quickly. Otherwise what happens is they'll droop, and they just distort. So PLA, which is polylactic acid, the yellow version of that is PLA. The blue version is PET G, which is water bottle, PET. So I had to design something. I looked on Thingiverse. Anybody know what Thingiverse?

So if you're not familiar, Thingiverse is maker bots online repository for all things 3D printable. If you want to find something cool to 3D print, it's either on Thingiverse or Grab CAD, but I looked on Thingiverse and I looked on Grab CAD, and I really didn't find anything that fit my needs. And being a designer, I've been a designer since the early 90s using AutoCAD first and then into Inventor. I said, well, let me design something, and I recruited Jerry's help to build this thing in Fusion.

So that part cooler has to fit, and it has to perform a task. So the requirements for that are it has to provide sufficient cooling. I don't want it interfering with the printed part, so if it hits the printed part, it'll knock it over. And I don't want it interfering with the movement of the printer. Plus I want it to be 3D printable.

And the limitations are so we had size, we had-- we're using a specific fan type mounting and we wanted it easy to print, something that didn't require a lot of support removal afterwards. Support+ is just extra structure that holds up the part where it's, sort of, hanging out in space. So Jerry is going to take over from here and give you guys the lowdown on Fusion. Whoops, there we go.

JERRY BERNS: OK.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Whoops, go back. We are seven, and there we go. JERRY BERNS: Oh, yes. OK.

So Fusion 360 Cloud-Centric device-- or Cloud-Centric platform allows you to do solid modeling. It allows you to do free form modeling. You can do direct editing with this tool. Really it's an advanced design tool for what is inside of this package. You can design a single part or an entire assembly inside of a single window. You can create the assemblies then, build the simulations have that actually operate for you, build your 2-D drawings from this. Once you've got it designed, you can then test it with a built in FEA. You can test for stress, low frequencies, thermal. That's the standard package. The ultimate edition has got buckling and several other advanced testing that you can do.

What else we got? CAM Simulation, you saw that. Again, once you get it designed and tested, then you can send it off to fabrication. there's CAM tools built inside, and what we're going to be seeing today is the 3D printing tools that are in there. So an incredible amount of package, and that video has got to get updated, because now they've got sheet metal in there also. So incredible amount for inside of this one little package here.

STEVEN SCHAIN: OK, that's what we started with.

JERRY BERNS: Oh, yes. I'm so anxious to start showing you Fusion. The starting model, let's talk about that. Again, Steve mentioned that this is the model that he received from the manufacturer. They had several of these components already modeled, so that he didn't have to start from scratch. What there were, though, there was a few pieces that were missing. Those had to be modeled. Many-- let's see you got the motor off of Grab CAD.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Got the motor off of Grab CAD. The nut or the printhead assembly was off of the manufacturer's website.

JERRY BERNS: So that's great when you've got that solid model that you can already start with. So we know that those were going to have to be modeled inside of Fusion. So time to take some measurements. Get out some calipers and take some good measurements. This is going to be pretty precise. You don't want to just use a regular old tape measure. Get some calipers and take some decent measurements on those parts. Modeled them up, put them into the environment or the assembly, and started building from that.

Then we're going to show how we can create that duct in Fusion 360. Now this first one is just a real simplified version of just testing it for fit. Are we going to be able to put it onto the existing parts that are there, get around or get it modeled around the printhead? And my screen is live now. OK, great. This is the model, and we can spin around so you can see. Those blue parts, those were also 3D printed.

So I thought why not start with what's already been created. Here I'm inside of a single environment. I'm inside of an assembly, but all of these exist as parts. So if you are familiar with Inventor where you've got to have parts, you've got to make the parts, and then put them inside of the assembly, you can just create inside of a single environment. If I send this file to somebody, the entire assembly is in one file. All of these parts all contained. Here's another version of it where I've already gone ahead and turned off some of the components. So I will start out creating a new component.

STEVEN SCHAIN: And that blue piece there I designed based on the mounting that was available.

JERRY BERNS: All right, so with that in place now I want to start designing that component that-- the part cooling duct as it wraps around this. And I can reference the other geometry that's here. I"m going to set up a mid plane, and I can reference information in here. Actually, can we get that? There we go and select that to. And I didn't have to project any geometry. If you're familiar with some other CAD model, I mean, I just-- I want to create a new part. I want to use that face and use that face and find half way in between it. There's my sketch plane.

OK pick up my plane. Start my sketching. Now I need to know where that existing port is. Again, that's the duck for bringing the air from the centrifugal fan as we're going to aim it towards the printhead, and I need to know where that existing geometry is. So using my project tool, I can bring in edges, so I know where that is. Whoops, finish that out. And then continue starting my sketches here. So I need to know to go from that point-- did I get it? There we go. Come on. Come on you. Hit the line command. Excellent. Bring it down a ways.

I'm going to wrap around the part. I'm just sketching, getting it close. What I like to tell folks is when you're sketching this out, just get it close. If I can get the right-- there we go. Reference that point, bring it down. Again, close enough. There. Did you see the color change? It filled in. That lets me know that I've got a closed boundary. So I've connected all the dots. I've got a closed shape. I can start extruding that now versus, oh, I'm going to extrude. What do you mean it won't extrude? I can't find a closed region. I know that I've got success here.

With it sketched, what I need to do now is constrain it or a term that I use is SCD, sketch it, constrain it, dimension it. I've got it sketched. Now to add on those geometric constraints to tell it how to maintain that shape. I'm not worried about the size yet. Shape, OK. For example, I want these two edges over here to be equal in length, OK. I also want them to be straight across from each other, so I can use a tool called collinear. I can use tools in here to make sure that other end points are straight across from each other, horizontally constrained. At this point--

STEVEN SCHAIN: Did that take?

JERRY BERNS: Did it take.

STEVEN SCHAIN: I don't think that last horizontal constraint.

JERRY BERNS: That last horizontal didn't take. I may have been picking a little too fast. Thank you, Steve. Let's get that one and that one. There we go. That looks better. How are we doing here? Drag it around. See it changing. There we go, seeing that change. Now I need to make sure that this is going to stay in the center, so I'm going to add a constraint. It's going to put this point, line it up with the midpoint. I learned this trick a little while back. I'm trying to find the midpoint.

If you hold down the Shift key, Fusion can then go in and find those midpoints for you. Did I get the horizontal, vertical. Let's try that again. Pick up the point, hold down the Shift key, it finds that midpoint. Maybe a little tough to see, but there's that little x right in there, and that point is now right underneath it, so great. It makes it-- it's less geometry that I have to put in there. Whoops, let's bring that side back in. All right, next up we've got to get some parallels and get these edges straight with each other.

Oh, we got a mistake in there. We got an error right about there maybe. Let's take that one out. It didn't get the equal in there. Come on. All right. It's getting [INAUDIBLE].

STEVEN SCHAIN: Parallel [INAUDIBLE].

JERRY BERNS: Yep. Get these parallel to each other.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yeah, this was something that we ran into when we were testing this. Sometime you have to put dimensions on here. So if you're just constraining, we-- Jerry and I were playing around with this the other day. You want to make sure that you add a couple of geometric or dimensional constraints that way you have guides for the geometric constraints. Because sum of the geometric constraints, they don't know where things are supposed to go and what the distances are. So you want to make sure that you get the geometric constraints or the dimensional constraints in their.

JERRY BERNS: All right, well, let's keep going here. Let's put some dimensions in here. Again, we're being able to reference directly from that existing model. Try that again. Dimension from here to the edge of the part needs to be four millimeters. And then from there that one didn't take, did it?

STEVEN SCHAIN: Nope.

JERRY BERNS: All right. Oh, you're being ornery. Well, OK. We've got to back up just in case.

STEVEN SCHAIN: That's all right.

JERRY BERNS: All right, let's go. Well, let's pretend and stop that sketch. I apologize folks. Let's keep moving on here. With that roughly wrapped around-- again, we're after, kind of, a prototyping example-- I can then take that shape and under my create tool tell it to extrude it. Extrude that up and down symmetrically. Symmetrically, thank you. There we go. So I can start to see how tall do I need to make sure that I'm going far enough past the print head. Below it, but not too far down below, because obviously we don't want to be intersecting or interfering with the model that we're going to be printing.

So with that completed, I can go in and create another midplane. Now this is a great feature. I want to construct a midplane halfway between this now. I'm going to pick this face. Other models you may have to turn the model around to see the back side of it. If I hover over the face that I need, left click and hold, I can work my way through the model to find those other faces. You can work your way down through the model. There's a parent tool that lets me work my way up through the model. So very handy to be able to find those other faces.

There's the work plane I need. Pick the face. Start my sketch. Come on, pick the face. Begin that sketch. We've got slicing tools, so I can cut it in half, and now I can see that other reference geometry. There is the fan up here. Here's the other 3D part that Steve designed. That's where the air's going to be coming out. I need to have a part that's going to reference those edges. So I can sketch some lines, wind Up on that end point, go over here a little ways, drop it in arc, drop in a line, drop in another arc, bring it on over here, so this is going to be a little bit long Steve. Bare with me.

STEVEN SCHAIN: That's all right.

JERRY BERNS: Bring it in it. Went a little bit high on that one. That's all right. We can bring that back. Again, did you see the color change? It knows that I have formed that closed shape. Bring that down a little bit. Bring this down, and it's going to be a little funky. With that, finish the sketch. There's my profile. Going to do another extrusion. This time I want that to intersect with the other material that I've already modeled. So instead of creating a new part or a new body, we'll have it create an intersection of those. As I start to drag symmetrically--

STEVEN SCHAIN: Grab the other section there.

JERRY BERNS: Oops, another section in there we got to add. There we go. What I noticed in here is that it's about to find an intersection of that body. I certainly don't want it intersecting with anything else in here. A recent addition in Fusion is this new objects to cut. You can be careful and make sure that you're not cut through or involving other components. Two choices, you can either turn the part off in the browser first or you can go into this and tell it which objects you don't want, so if I don't need the nozzle to be involved in it or some of these other devices. We do want that one and we don't need that. So with that in place, hit OK, and you can see it start to take shape, all right.

Let's jump over here to this one. Stepping through, there's that yolk shape. There's the intersection of those two volumes. Next, what we're going to be doing is putting in the vents where the air's going to be coming out. So for that, we put in some sketches. We put an ellipse onto a face. Got another ellipse on that face, and you notice that it is separate from the one next to it. We use a split tool, so that we can separate it.

And the reason that we did that is when we go to hollow this out-- obviously, it's a cooling duct. Air has to pass through-- the airs got to be able to come out of that. We need it to separate that-- the slot shape from the rectangular shape around it. So using the split tool, we are able to recognize that as a separate face. That's important when we next do the shell operation and actually make that hollow, so now our air can get through. OK, continuing on through.

Of course, is it needs to be able to mount on to the rear duct where the fan is connected, so putting in a tab, adding in some holes, so they can mount together. We've got some reinforcing ribs in there. There goes the holes. So again, building up this first prototype, seeing how it was going to fit on the printer. Is going to be able to connect to the existing duct? How's that going to wrap around? Get that shape around the print head itself there. So quick proofing of concept that, yes, this is a shape. This of the duct that we want to be able to wrap around and help with the cooling of the material.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Thank you, Jerry.

JERRY BERNS: You're welcome, Steve.

STEVEN SCHAIN: All right, so a little bit about the design process. Again, the processes is slightly different depending on what industry you're in, but in general, you start with a plan, a sketch, an idea. The first thing that I did was I sketched this out, and just, sort of, said, OK, well how does it-- how is it going to look? What do I want it to look like? How do I want this to fit? How am I going to deliver the air to the specific area that I want it to-- that I want to deliver it to. And then take that and put it into Fusion, right.

So design the part and put that into Fusion, work with it in Fusion. You can also do CFD, so you can do the computational fluid dynamics and see how much air is actually coming out. You know the specs on the blower that's putting the air in. You can actually figure out how much air is coming out, and there's calculations you can do based on the temperature of the print head, the speed of the part, and the material, and you can figure out, OK, well I need this much air coming through. I don't know how to do that, so experimentation is the best way to figure it out.

Then you 3D print it. That's the easy part in a lot of cases, because nowadays 3D printing is load it into your slicer and send it off. You test it, and then go back to the drawing board and either present it to somebody, present it to yourself. And then you, sort of, go through that loop as many times as you have to, and at some point you jump out and go it's done or it's done enough, right. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. I think Picasso said that. I don't remember who said that. Somebody said that famous, and it was not me.

So when we evaluated the first prototype, this right here is the first prototype, I think-- nope, this is the second prototype. So the first prototype is the one with the short nozzles. You got the first prototype. Yeah, so actually that's the second prototype. So I have that wrong. That is the second, because the first one was just to fit. So he's got the first and the second back there. So if you want to look.

And what we discovered or what I discovered in my garage when I was printing with it was a couple of things, there was not enough airflow. It was not cooling the material enough. I would get sag. I wasn't getting really nice defined layer lines. And I determined that it just wasn't cooling well enough even at 100% of the fan power. The other one, which is even worse is it cooled the nozzle.

And what happens when you cool the nozzle is it cools the material in the nozzle, which hardens the material in the nozzle and you have to heat the nozzle up and get a special point four millimeter drill bit or take the nozzle off and clean it out, which is a pain. So we, sort of, went back to the drawing board, and Jerry is going to talk about modifying the CAD model in Fusion. So let me switch over, Jerry. Oh, wrong one. Sorry. It went to black.

JERRY BERNS: Going to black. Right, so again here was that the first prototype, the red zero. Here was the next revision of that making the changes to it here. Whoops, go back here. And you can see that the additions that we've added in there putting in some radiuses, rounding off the corners just to help improve the air flow there, and instead of having those vents coming straight out cooling the duct, there were vents added to direct the air down more towards the filament rather than the nozzle head itself, OK.

And we were experimenting with some different options in here. Let me step forward, you can see the little curve here at the end. I'll step back. Trying to figure out what's going to be the best angle for that air as it's coming out trying to precisely get that adjusted. So we had put that in there. We can go back with the timeline that's in here. We can roll back. Try printing out a version. See how well that works. Now print with this feature turned back on, not suppressed. So real easy with the timeline to go back and forth between different revisions in Fusion, try what ifs, OK.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Oh, we have to switch back.

JERRY BERNS: We got to switch back.

STEVEN SCHAIN: That's still you.

JERRY BERNS: So that's still me. Yes, again, the benefits of the timeline to be able to make those quick turnarounds inside of the model, obviously, no need to rebuild from scratch. You can leverage the sketches that are in there, use that timeline. Be sure to turn the timeline on. There is a setting in Fusion. If you have not started using it, you can design history free. If you are going to be doing parametric modeling like this, please you want to have that design history turned on. You need that timeline being captured down at the bottom, if you don't you are strictly working in direct editing. You're going to be pushing and pulling surfaces. You're not going to be able to make relationships and say this is equal to this divided by 2. So be sure to get that timeline turned on.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So one thing, the stop is here because there was a major problem. And the major problem was that hot end, which is the piece with the rubber E 3D block on it, when I go to adjust it sometimes, I'm doing it quickly and I need to rotate it a little bit just to keep that nozzle tight. There wasn't enough clearance. And also what was happening was the wires on the side were getting pinched, and there's a therma-- there's a thermistor there that's determining the temperature.

And that thermistor was-- the wires coming out of that were getting jiggled as the print head moved, and I was getting errors, thermal errors saying I can't read the temperature. So it just stops the printer. It's a safety issue. If it doesn't know how hot the hot end is, it just doesn't-- it just turns it off and doesn't print. So the-- so we came up with a solution and Jerry's going to show you the difference between the different revisions of what we came up with.

JERRY BERNS: OK, we were switched, excellent.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yep.

So So here in the Rev 3, we have the condition where they're fairly close together. And again, we can go back and deal with that original sketch. Here we can see that they are just eight millimeters apart from the edge of the print head to the edge of our cooling duct. Easy change, change that over to nine millimeters, spreads that out. Easy to go back into the timeline, make those necessary changes, finish the sketch, and watch it all update. Got some warnings on the fillets. We can go back and address that later.

Now because we pushed the two sides out, what are we going to have to do to those vents that are coming down? We may have to adjust that parameter. Again, it's got features in here for changing that. So here we'll be-- after we solved, we took care of some of those fillets that we had it in there. Here's the revision now with the arms spread out a little bit wider, the vents extended, and now the print head can turn. You can do a full 180 can't you now?

STEVEN SCHAIN: You can turn 180 degrees. The other thing that was happening was this-- I actually put the original version up on Thingiverse for people to download and use, and I got a couple of guys saying, hey, mine melted. I was like, well, that's a problem, isn't it? So by extending this and widening it, we saw a couple of problems. One is it's further away from the print head, so it's not going to be as hot. It won't melt. A second one is-- and I don't know if you can see it, but go back to revision two.

JERRY BERNS: Two?

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yeah.

JERRY BERNS: There you go.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So if you look here, this front is, sort of, a bull nose front, right. Well, there's support that needed to be made inside of the print of the part to keep that held up and printed properly, and I didn't want that. So go to Rev three, and you'll see that we tried to address that by, sort of, fixing it. And that didn't, sort of, work. But now if you go to the last revision, this now is actually almost blending right into the front of the nozzle. This nozzle is about 4 millimeters wider than the original. And it-- the airflow is a lot more constant. It's cleaner coming out, and you don't have problems with it melting.

When the guy on Thingiverse sent me a message, he's like, yeah, it melted and like just drooped right onto the part and broke part, and I said, well, all right, back to the drawing board. So I called Jerry, and I said we got to do something about this. So the-- let's go back to the video tape here. So the revision four, this is the last revision actually printing, and it's printing what we're giving you today. So for those of you who stayed, thank you very much. You guys get rewarded for staying.

So this is the printer in-action. It's printing. It's-- you're into 3D printing or you want to learn about 3D printing, it is a cool kit. It's like $500. So it's expensive, but it's not terrible. If you work on it, you could get it put together in a weekend. And then probably another two weekends to get it working right. If you're like me and you-- like the rest of us, we actually have work and a life, it might take a month to two months. I think it took me three or four months to actually get it working. So printing the models, Jerry, is going to talk a little bit about that. So you've got--

JERRY BERNS: We've got some slides here.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yep.

JERRY BERNS: OK, so exporting the STL file, most of you may know if you've been using 3D printing, you need to get an STL file. OK, and that can be exported, obviously, right out of Fusion. There's a couple of different avenues you can take to get that STL file. You can go to the File menu to get it. You can go to the print panel and get access to it. There's also 3D printing services.

Earlier we polled the audience, and we saw that many of you are using 3D printers. If you don't have a printer, they've got printing surface access built into Fusion. You can send your part out to one of these printing services and get a quote, what's it going to cost to have this thing printed for you? So they try to think of everything. If you don't have your own printer, let's give you access to some printing services. OK, and--

STEVEN SCHAIN: Switch over to you.

JERRY BERNS: Switching over to me. We're there.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yep.

JERRY BERNS: So here inside of the make panel is the 3D print. You select the part that you're going to send out. You can preview a mesh. Before I select it, I want to show you some of these refinement options. How faceted, how smooth do you want to send out your model? If you're looking for something fast, send out as few of possible. Set up just a low. If you're looking for something that's going to have a nice smooth arc or if you've got arcs and curves in there and you want them smoothed out either go to a medium or high. You will pay the price. The bigger the file, the more triangles it creates.

So here it said on the low desolation. We'll select it, and it comes up with quick calculation about just under 17,000 triangles for this model. If I were to go up to a medium or high, obviously, it's going to calculate more.

STEVEN SCHAIN: And to be honest with you, this is enough for--

JERRY BERNS: For this size of part, right.

STEVEN SCHAIN: -- the part that we're making now.

JERRY BERNS: Yeah.

STEVEN SCHAIN: This is good enough. You don't need a high resolution part necessary.

JERRY BERNS: If you're going to send it to a 3D print utility, such as Mesh Mixer, Print Studio, Preform, you can enable that option, send it directly out to there. If you've got your own custom slicing tool, slicing software, you can send it out to custom. If I don't choose to send it out to a device, hit OK. It's going to ask me what do you want to name the STL file. So you've got a little bit more options when you go through the print versus just, hey, Fusion, make me an STL. Here I want to print it, and here's the settings that I want when you create that STL. So I recommend go use the Print menu, OK. And we'd hit Save, and we'd have an STL when it's all done.