Design for 3D-Printing

Summary

Over the past years, I have gotten deeper and deeper into 3d-printing. One thing that fascinates me a lot is how different it is from other manufacturing methods. And how this, in turn, means a completely different design philosophy is needed to create good designs for 3d-printing. As such, I have been collecting the little tricks and rules for designing well-printable parts. And of course I am always on the hunt for more. In this blog post I want to share all that I have learned. Introduction While a lot can be found online about the basics of design for 3d-printing, there is not that much material that dives into it in-depth. And even less common are good overviews that collect all the little tricks that people have discovered. I believe the best format for teaching the rules of well-printable design is a format that is built on rules of thumb and many practical examples. While such heuristic rules will never encompass the whole complexity of the real world, I think they can provide a tangible guide towards the best solution in each situation. They also provide a starting point for building your own intuition about the topic. This approach is close in spirit to the german book Konstruktionspraxis im Maschinenbau by Gerhard Hoenow and Thomas Meißner (Hanser Fachbuch, ISBN 978-3-446-46485-8). The book follows the same philosophy, but for traditional manufacturing methods. If you like this style, that book might interest you as well. Scope Before diving in, a few words about the scope of this blog post: First, I am explicitly focusing on FDM/FFF printing (Wikipedia). A lot of the rules are specifically tied to the restrictions of this process and do not apply to other additive manufacturing methods. Second, I am focusing on designing functional parts with optimal mechanical properties. These parts should be easy to print, without requiring much printer fine-tuning. They should be easy to produce in higher quantity, which means they should require as little post-proce...