Learn 15 Print-in-Place Mechanisms In 15 Minutes

May 11, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 4 Comments

3D printed in-place mechanisms and flexures, such as living hinges, are really neat when you can get them to print correctly. But how do you actually do that? YouTuber [Slant 3D] is here with a helpful video demonstrating the different kinds of springs and hinges (Video, embedded below) that can be printed reliably, and discusses some common pitfalls and areas to concentrate upon.

Living hinges are everywhere and have been used at least as long as humans have been around. The principle is simple enough; join two sections to move with a thinned section of material that, in small sections, is flexible enough to distort a few times without breaking off. The key section is “a few times”, as all materials will eventually fail due to overworking. However, if this thing is just a cheap plastic case around a low-cost product, that may not be a huge concern. The video shows a few ways to extend flexibility, such as spreading the bending load across multiple flexure elements to reduce the wear of individual parts, but that comes at the cost of compactness.

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Move Over, Lithophane: 3D Printed 3D Photos With Gaussian Splats

May 10, 2025 by Tyler August 24 Comments

If you had asked us yesterday “How do you 3D Print a Photo”, we would have said “well, that’s easy, do a lithophane”– but artist, hacker and man with a very relaxing voice [Wyatt Roy] has a much more impressive answer: Gaussian splats, rendered in resin.

Gaussian splats are a 3D scanning technique aimed at replicating a visual rather than geometry, like the mesh-based 3D-scanning we usually see on Hackaday. Using photogrammetry, a point cloud is generated with an associated 3D Gaussian function describing the colour at that point. Blend these together, and you can get some very impressive photorealistic 3D environments. Of course, printing a Gaussian smear of colour isn’t trivial, which is where the hacking comes in.

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Best Practices For FDM Printing

May 10, 2025 by Al Williams 38 Comments

If you’ve been designing parts for 3D printing, you probably have some tricks and standards for your designs. [Rahix] decided to write out a well-thought-out set of design rules for FDM prints, and we can all benefit.

One of the things we liked about the list is that it’s written in a way that explains everything. Every so often, there’s a box with a summarized rule for that topic. At the end, there’s a list of all the rules. The rules are also in categories, including part strength, tolerance, optimization, integration, machine elements, appearance, and vase mode.

For example, section two deals with tolerance and finish. So, rule R2.8 says, “Do not use circular holes for interference fits. Use hexagon or square holes instead.”

We also appreciate that [Rahix] touched on some of the counter-intuitive aspects of designing for FDM printing. For example, you might think adding voids in your part will reduce the filament and time required to print it, but in many cases it can have the opposite effect.

Some of these — maybe even most of these — won’t surprise you, but you still might take away a tidbit or two. But having it all down in a checklist and then the ability to scroll up and find the rationale for the rule is great.

Do you have any rules you’d add? Or change? Let us know. Meanwhile, we were eyeing our favorites about adding machine elements to prints.

Scan Your Caliper For Physical Part Copies

May 9, 2025 by Al Williams 60 Comments

We’ve certainly seen people take a photo of a part, bring it into CAD, and then scale it until some dimension on the screen is the same as a known dimension of the part. We like what [Scale Addition] shows in the video below. In addition to a picture of the part, he also takes a picture of a vernier caliper gripping the part. Now your scale is built into the picture, and you can edit out the caliper later.

He uses SketchUp, but this would work on any software that can import an image. Given the image with the correct scale, it is usually trivial to sketch over the image or even use an automatic tracing function. You still need some measurements, of course. The part in question has a vertical portion that doesn’t show up in a flat photograph. We’ve had good luck using a flatbed scanner before, and there’s no reason you couldn’t scan a part with a caliper for scale.

This is one case where a digital caliper probably isn’t as handy as an old-school one. But it would be possible to do the same trick with any measurement device. You could even take your picture on a grid of known dimensions. This would also allow you to check that the distances at the top and bottom are the same as the distances on the right and left.

Of course, you can get 3D scanners, but they have their own challenges.

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3D Printed TPU Bellows With PLA Interface Layers

May 8, 2025 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Of all FDM filament types, flexible ones such as TPU invite a whole new way of thinking, as well as applications. Case in point the TPU-based bellows that the [Functional Part Friday] channel on YouTube recently demonstrated.

The idea is quite straightforward: you print TPU and PLA in alternating layers, making sure that the TPU is connected to its previous layer in an alternating fashion. After printing, you peel the PLA and TPU apart, remove the PLA layers and presto, you got yourself bellows.

There were some issues along the way, of course. Case in point the differences between TPU from different brands (Sainsmart, Sunlu) that caused some headaches, and most of all the incompatibility between the Bambu Lab AMS and TPU that led to incredibly brittle TPU prints. This required bypassing the feed mechanism in the AMS, which subsequently went down a rabbit hole of preventing the PTFE tube from getting sucked into the AMS. Being able to print TPU & PLA at the same time also requires a printer with two independent extruders like the Bambu Lab H2D used here, as both materials do not mix in any way. Great news for H2D and IDEX printer owners, of course.

As for practical applications for bellows, beyond printing your own 1900s-era camera, accordion or hand air bellows, you can also create lathe way covers and so on.

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Liquid Silicone 3D Printing Is No Joke

May 7, 2025 by Tyler August 45 Comments

They might call it Levity, but there’s nothing funny about Rapid Liquid Print’s new silicone 3D printer. It has to be seen to be believed, and luckily [3D Printing Nerd] gives us lots of beauty shots in this short video, embedded below.

Smooth, and *fast*. This bladder took 51 minutes according to the RLP website.

Printing a liquid, even a somewhat-viscous one like platinum-cure silicone, presents certain obvious challenges. The Levity solves them with buoyancy: the prints are deposited not onto a bed, but into a gel, meaning they are fully supported as the silicone cures. The fact that the liquid doesn’t cure instantly has a side benefit: the layers bleed into one another, which means this technique should (in theory) be stronger in all directions than FDM printing. We have no data to back that up, but what you can see for yourself that the layer-blending creates a very smooth appearance in the finished prints.

If you watch the video, it really looks like magic, the way prints appear in the gel. The gel is apparently a commercially-available hydrogel, which is good since the build volume looks to need ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶5̶0̶0̶ ̶L̶ at least 125 L of the stuff. The two-part silicone is also industry-standard and off-the-shelf, though no doubt the exact ratios and are tweaked for purpose. There’s no magic, just a really neat technology.

If you want one, you can sign up for the waiting list at Rapid Liquid Print’s website, but be prepared to wait; units ship next year, and there’s already a list.

Alternatively, since there is no magic here, we’d love to see someone take it on themselves, the way once equally exotic SLS printers have entered the DIY world. There was a time when resin printers were new and exotic and hobbyists had to roll their own, too. None of this is to say we don’t respect the dickens out of the Rapid Liquid Print team and their achievement–it’s just that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Continue reading “Liquid Silicone 3D Printing Is No Joke” →

3D Print Your Own Injection Molds, Ejector Pins And All

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

3D printing is all well and good for prototyping, and it can even produce useful parts. If you want real strenght in plastics, though, or to produce a LOT of parts, you probably want to step up to injection molding. As it turns out, 3D printing can help in that regard, with injection molding company [APSX] has given us a look at how it printed injection molds for its APSX-PIM machine.

The concept is simple enough—additive manufacturing is great for producing parts with complex geometries, and injection molds fit very much under that banner. To demonstrate, [APSX] shows us a simple injection mold that it printed with a Formlabs Form3+ using Rigid 10K resin. The mold has good surface finish, which is crucial for injection molding nice parts. It’s also fitted with ejection pins for easy part removal after each shot of injection molded plastic. While it’s not able to hold up like a traditional metal injection mold, it’s better than you might think. [APSX] claims it got 500 automatic injection cycles out of the mold while producing real functional parts. The mold was used with the APSX-PIM injection molding machine squirting polypropylene at a cycle time of 65 seconds, producing a round part that appears to be some kind of lid or gear.

This looks great, but it’s worth noting it’s still not cheap to get into this sort of thing. On top of purchasing a Formlabs Form3+, you’ll also need the APSX-PIM V3, which currently retails for $13,500 or so. Still, if you regularly need to make 500 of something, this could be very desirable. You could get your parts quicker and stronger compared to running a farm of many 3D printers turning out the same parts.

We’ve seen similar projects along these lines before. The fact is that injections molds are complicated geometry to machine, so being able to 3D print them is highly desirable. Great minds and all that. Video after the break.

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