Ball joint thing
I’ve designed a new part for printing on Bender1 . Here’s a picture of the part. I’m trying to see if I can print a working ball joint. Obviously, it needs to consist of breakaway multi-parts.
If this works I’d like to try using it as a component of a larger more complicated object. However, Skeinforge throws a fit every time I try to skein it. I’m uploading it here in case anyone can help me fix it.
- If you’re just tuning in, that’s the name of my MakerBot [↩]
cool idea.
:) Thank you. Once I can get it to work I think people can incorporate it as a component of larger useful items. I’m thinking of one that could work as a bearing of sorts.
It seems you’re using sketchup… Since it’s not a solid modeler, it’s ambiguous what’s the inside and what’s the outside of the object.
All of the purple faces are inverted. You shouldn’t see those or they shouldn’t be purple. You normally should only see white/grey-ish faces. You can invert them by right-clicking on them and choosing invert face. Also have a look at the cadspan plugin, it has several aids to create solid models, including a shrinkwrapping service that will make sure your model is 100% printable.
For such an application (tight tolerances, parts that should mate) OpenSCAD seems very appropriate. Designing something like this would take a few minutes. Union of a spere, two cylinders. Removing that (scaled up a few percents) from the mating part. which is made in the same way.
I’ve uploaded a derivative to thingiverse to show what it would look like when made with OpenSCAD.