FreeCAD News

It’s won­der­ful when peo­ple take the time to share the exper­tise they’ve devel­oped. Even more so when the result­ing arti­cle is filled with FreeCAD screenshots. 

Fab­u­lous FreeCAD user Rahix has put togeth­er this impres­sive long read (80 mins) over on their blog. It’s a col­lec­tion of knowl­edge relat­ing to var­i­ous areas of 3D print­ing includ­ing design­ing for part strength, func­tion­al inte­gra­tion chal­lenges and prac­tice, process opti­mi­sa­tion and more. 

Whilst it def­i­nite­ly does­n’t shy away from look­ing at under­ly­ing engi­neer­ing prin­ci­ples, for exam­ple there’s a great sec­tion on cor­ner geome­tries and forces, it’s writ­ten as a great col­lec­tion of heuris­tics with clear expla­na­tions of the risks and rewards of dif­fer­ent approach­es. Glanc­ing through every sec­tion it gen­tly ques­tions those deci­sions we prob­a­bly all make at our 3D print­er and nudges us towards bet­ter prac­tice. It’s bril­liant­ly writ­ten and def­i­nite­ly worth reading. 

Final­ly, it’s love­ly to see that Rahix includes exam­ples of where he has seen excel­lence in design approach­es. For exam­ple there’s dis­cus­sion of approach­es using sequen­tial bridges to cre­ate part geome­tries that can print suc­cess­ful­ly with­out the, some­times prob­lem­at­ic, use of sup­port mate­ri­als. Rahix gives men­tion to our friends over at the Open­Flex­ure project cit­ing them as a great exam­ple of this approach. 

Thanks for tak­ing the time to write this valu­able mate­r­i­al up Rahix!