instructables

Print-in-Place Spring Loaded Box

by Turbo_SunShine

Hi! My name is SunShine, and in this Instructables I will show you how to use Fusion 360 as a design tool to create
Print in Place designs for FDM-3D-printers, and share some of my tricks that I use to make a working design.
Speci cally, in this Instructables I will show you how to design a spring-loaded box, but the main focus of this
instructables will be to show you the principles that can be applied to other designs!

I made a short video on this project:

//www.yout ube.com/embed/IrT1DaSBeQ4

(PS. If you feel like being laz y, and just want a print in place box, I have released the STL’s for it so you can simply
print it without having to put in the design work, but that’s no-fun, is it? (links at the end))

What is a print in place design?

Print in place means that an assembly is printed without the need for any further manual assembly, and one can
start using the part right away. The example that I will show you today is a spring-loaded box; this box could have
easily been designed with multiple parts and assembled afterwards. However, today we will learn how you can put
in a little extra e ort in the design stage and save on time and e ort in the production stage by printing the entire
assembly fully assembled and ready for use!

Supplies:

What you will need to follow this guide:

Some experience with 3D-printing

Some experience designing in Fusion 360 (you should be comfortable with creating parts and
assemblies)
Fusion 360 (Home/Student-license is free)
InkScape (optional and free)

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Step 1: Get an Idea!

This is the most di cult step if you ask me. Finding Does it look cool?
something you would like to design Print in place, but
not having it be too complex is a di cult task (it’s Could one simplify existing designs?
di cult to design a Curta-mechanical-calculator to be
print in place), but here are some criteria I like to Can you design the mechanism in a single plane?
consider when thinking about things to design: (usually the easiest to design it to lay at on the print
bed.)
Does it have 2-4 moving parts?
What mechanisms/structures do you want to use?
Could it be designed without supports? (Bridging, overhangs, threads, gears, springs, ect.)

Step 2: Plan Your Design!

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Get a pen and paper and start trying to visualize the When I designed the spring-loaded box, this was my
assembly you want to create, it does not have to be a plan that I sketched. (see picture)
technical drawing, just a sketch. Here you have to
estimate how large you want stu , and here you will While it is not pretty, you can already see that I
also plan what types of mechanisms you want to use, decided to add a half-gear to the lid-design to be able
are there any parts you can combine with the help of to have a square box without a big spiral spring
3D-printing? hanging out over the corner. We can also see that I

have decided to combine a gear with a spiral-spring to before, so I decided to name it a SunShine-Gear! (sun-
reduce the number of parts. (You can see that I also gear was already taken). The other gear we will call the
considered an air dampener initially, however, I “lid- gear” since it will be attached to the lid.
decided to scrap that idea, since after the initial tests i
found it not to be necessary.)

I have not seen a gear-spring combination like this

Step 3: Design Your Mechanism

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It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to design the clearance-tolerances you have selected, then they can
easy part rst, and then end up having to re-do simply compensate for that by adjusting the
everything because the mechanism you had planned "horizontal expansion compensation" in their slicer.
needed some changes to work properly, and now it However, if you have di erent tolerances at di erent
does not t with the rest. So, design the part that is places, they might end up with some clearances
going to change the most rst! becoming too lose, while others still being stuck.

The spring-loaded box also had its mechanism I would recommend 0 . 3m m as a clearance between
designed rst. Afterwards it was tested and tuned walls, from my experience it seems to be the tightest
until it would print easily, and function as intended. clearance most 3D-printers can do without sticking
(This functional test was later included in the released together.
les as the test piece, so that people could try to print
it before having to commit to printing the entire box.) The result of the following steps should be a
mechanical test piece shown in the pictures.
T he m o s t im po rt a nt t hing w he n de s ig ning a
m e cha nis m is t o ke e p t he cle a ra nce s The following steps describe how the mechanism was
co ns is t e nt . If someone wants to print your design designed for the Spring-loaded box:
on a printer that struggles with the

Step 4: Designing the Gears

The rst step was to design the gears is to choose how many teeth and module they should have. Luckily for us, its
really easy. From our previous sketches, we can estimate how large we want the box (around 70x70x70mm) and we
know that the lid gear has to be in the corner, and the SunShine-Gear around the centre, so knowing that, we just
assume that we want around 40mm between our two gears. (see, starting out with the mechanism is already
paying out! You don’t have to worry about exact distances yet!)

The calculation for the size of a spur gear is: Module*number of teeth=PCD. (Pitch Circle Diameter)

(see picture showing the PCD of both gears)

So, if we want 40mm between our 2 gear axles, we could either:

- Give both gears 20 teeth with a module of 2mm,

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 - or what I ended up with; 24 Teeth on the SunShine-Gear, and 16 on the Lid-Gear, both with a
module of 2mm.

In my experience a m o dule o f 2m m is t he s m a lle s t y o u ca n print e a s ily a nd re lia bly on common

household 3d-printers.

Another important parameter for print in place designs is the Backlash! W e w ill a d 0 . 6 m m t o g e t 0 . 3 m m o f
cle a ra nce w he n print ing .

Now that we know the parameters of our gears, how do we design them?

We could either look up in our engineering books how to properly design a gear with all its parameters, or we could
do the easy thing and use the “spur gear script” that is included in fusion 360!

(Tools>Add-ins>Scripts and add-ins>Spur Gear>Run)

With this you can easily create spur gears very quickly! (If you would rather like to create Helical gears like I used in
my design, you can download the “helical gear creation” plugin here created by community member Ross Korsky.)

Now that we have 2 separate parts with gears, we can put them in an assembly and check if everything lines up the
way we wanted, if so, we are ready to design the next part of the mechanism!

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Step 5: Designing the SunShine-Gear-spring

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This part is also quite easy. this, using LAR- principles (Looks About Right) is the
easiest and fastest way to design a spring. But if you
First hollow out the gear you want to place the spring are having issues imagining what size you want, start
in with a simple circular extrude-cut and then with out with a 1.2mm cross section and 3 rotations, and
the help of the “Coil” function under “ Create ” you can see if it is too sti , or if it has too much/too little travel
simply make a spiral spring! After creating a spring and adjust accordingly.
with a square cross section, you can use the extrude
tool to give the spring the desired height, by Rule o f t hum b: T he big g e r t he cro s s s e ct io n
extruding the top and or bottom face. t he s t i e r t he s pring - ra t e . W hile m o re
ro t a t io ns re duce t he s pring ra t e but g iv e
At this point you might wonder how to decide on the y o u m o re t ra v e l.
spring parameters (thickness, no. rotations,
corssection, ect.). For not so critical constructions like

Step 6: Connect the Lines! Uhmm, I Mean Parts, Connect the Parts!

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To make a print in place mechanism, you need to overhangs/bridges without supports later in this write
connect the parts in a way that allows them to move up.)
when the print is nished.
Connecting the Lid-gear is a little trickier since we
Let’s start with the SunShine-gear, since strictly must limit its movement in all directions, except for
speaking, it will be connected with the main part of the rotation around its axis. To solve this issue, I
the body. First, I made a wall partially around the gear decided to make a double conical axle, and a double
(keeping the 0.3mm clearance all the way) and conical hole in the Lid-gear. This way the gear can spin
connected it to the “axle” of the SunShine-gear with freely, but not move around axially and radially. This is
two “bridges”. There are 2 things to take note of here. possible to 3d print since there are no overhangs over
First, the “wall” around the gear has 2 functions, to 45 degrees! (see pictures)
build the bridges on, but also to hold the sunshine
gear in place, since the spring that the “axle” of the Notice that the lower cone is a steeper 50 Degrees,
gear is attached to, could move away from the Lid- rather than the traditional 45. This, and the rather
gear. The second ting to note is that we chose to a g g re s s iv e cha m f e r o n t he bo t t o m is t o
bridge to the axle and not just lled in the entire area a v o id t ha t t he “e le pha nt - f o o t ” e e ct whcich
over the SunShine-gear, this is because the way slicers might fuse the axle and the gear together if not
and 3d printers work, it will create a lot cleaner countered. (see pictures)
bridges. (I will go more in depth on how to build large

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Step 7: Print and Repeat!

Now you should have a design (that on paper) should With the box design I had the issues with the axle and
work. It’s time to put it to the test! Failure is the best the lid gear sticking together, I decided to make an
teacher, and usually the rst few versions need to be isolated axle and “sleeve” to tweak the parameters
revised. Every design has di erent challenges and by until it worked the way I wanted. The aggressive
extension di erent solutions. Sometimes it even chamfer at the bottom, and the 50 degrees on the
worth the time investment to make a model where lower cone got “developed” during this step. (see
the area with the issue is isolated. This allows for more picture)
testing and tuning with less print time.

Step 8: Build Around Your Design

Now that you have a working mechanism, it’s time to make something useful out of it! In my case it’s a box, so the
rest of the design does not have to be too complex or di cult to design. However, I wanted to show o some
modelling tools that don’t see being used too much, and that could come in very useful a lot of the times.
Print-in-Place Spring Loaded Box: Page 9
So the next few steps shows some design features that are not straight forward:

Step 9: The Huge Suportless “roof” on the Top of the Box

If you print the box sideways, as intended, you will -The rst one is to not bridge across right away, but to
have a large at overhang on the top. just bridge to the wall next to it. and work our way up
in 0.2mm segments at a time until the remaining
This is something that usually is solved by printing distance is bridgeable (see picture). But to use this, we
supports, but in our case, if we would print this box need to have 4 walls to build between, so we would
with supports, we would risk the slicer generating have to bridge straight across at least once, which
supports in the gears that would be di cult to leads us right to my second trick:
remove. Supports are also a waste of materials, so
designing to avoid it would be the ideal solution. -The second trick is to build up a bridge in a V shape,
this way, you will only end up with only 2-3 sagging
Bridging is an important tool, that we are going to bridging lines. It works like this: after the initial
use. However, as everyone knows, the longer the bridges (which will sag), the bridges will start to build
bridge, the more it sags. If we would simply try to on top of the initial bridges and after only a few layers
bridge the gap between the already printed walls, we you will get perfectly straight bridges! (and the few
would end up with something resembling a shing sagging bridge lines are easy to cut away afterwards.)
net. To avoid that. We use 2 tricks.

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Step 10: Using Loft’s

Using lofts is a powerful tool to connect two surfaces construction-plane parallel to the build plate and
with each other with a solid body. It can also be used sketched the outer diameter of the hinge. Then simply
to bend corners or ll in “those gaps” that you know a loft operation with tangential end caps to get that
you can physically ll but have a hard time lling with smooth, almost organic, look (Tangential end-caps are
extrudes and revolves. called direction in fusion 360). Afterwards its easy to
adjust the construction plane height to adjust the
It was with the help of a loft that I managed to create overhang angles. (see pictures)
the upper hinge. I did this by creating a

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Step 11: Importing SVG’s

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While not integral to the Print in place process, le and use the “trace bitmap” function to create
sometimes its nice to add a little air and personality vector lines out of the image. (I used the Color
to your designs. Importing SVG’s allows you to add a quantization-mode, but this is very speci c to the type
simple image or graphic to your design. I usually add of image you want to import.)
my logo on my designs.
Once that is done, one can easily import it into fusion
Depending on the layout (and source) of your picture 360 using the “import” function, and at that point, it
you want to use, creating an .svg le can have many basically functions as a sketch witch you can extrude
di erent methods. I use Inkscape, a free Scalable and add to your model.
Vector graphics (SVG) editor/creator to import a .jpeg

Step 12: Done!

Print-in-Place Spring Loaded Box: Page 13

Congrats! You have now nished your design! Give it a rel="nofollow">https://cults3d.com/en/3d-
test print, and if everything works as intended, release model/home/print-in-plac...
it!
You can reach me and nd my work on the following
Thank you for your attention, and feel free to reach sites:
out for questions and comments!
https://www.youtube.com/user/a09a21a
This was my rst Instructables and all feedback is
welcome! I included some pictures of my previous https://www.instagram.com/sunshine_turbo
projects, let me know if something seems interesting
and you would like me to write an instructables about https://www.thingiverse.com/Turbo_SunShine
it.
https://cults3d.com/en/users/SunShine/
You can nd the STL's for the print in place box here:
https://www.facebook.com/SunShine13337/
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4382544

Print-in-Place Spring Loaded Box: Page 14

I'm making it now. I'm a product designer and I really appreciate your build and design tips and
tricks.
My wife and I like it! She wants me to print her one.
Very creative design. You're literally thinking and designing outside the box!
Gary
Thanks :)

Excellent work, but also great job on describing your process and the considerations required to
make it functional. I spent most of the article nodding my head thinking "yup, that's all good advice,
that's how I'd do it too", but the support-less roof is inspired, that's an excellent technique I'm going
to be sure to add to my arsenal!
Thanks! Happy to hear it was useful to you :)

Amazing design, and a great instructable. Your technique for the supportless roof is great, so if I
read this section correctly you created roughly six tiers. Each tier you created a triangle where the
hypotenuse was the overhang maximum? I think this would make a great SW plugin or STL
manipulation technique.
Hi, thanks! :D
Essentially yes! this way the longest bridging distance is reduced, and the "sagging" that you
usually would get minimized :)
Some sort of a automatic script would be cool! sadly I don't have much coding experience...
I really like this design! Thanks for sharing it :)

Glad you liked it! :)

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