Excellent tutorial! I would suggest Grouping the two halves of the threads prior to copying them so they act as a single 360 degree object. Would cut your workload in half I would think! Keep up the good work :)
Thanks for this - I found 123D somewhat infuriating whilst following along, but did get there in the end. I tested one change: I made one nut the way you show, scaling the subtractive thread uniformly. Then I made a second nut, scaling the thread component in X & Y only. The second nut spins much more freely on the bolt, as the thread pitch (Z scale) matches that of the bolt.
Jonathan Sanderson Interesting! I noticed the other day that if you change the slicer settings so that the permitter width is the same as your nozzle diameter, you get pieces that fit together much better. This is however at the cost of the strength of the part if it is not solid. I will have to try out your method. Thanks!
Yes, those are very light and can be replaced to lots of heavy metal bolt and nut for weight reduction purpose. And I found tinkercad is very easy tool cause they have community shape menu which has lots of famous standard template format and so I can reduce the time for producing input file.
really good idea, thanks for sharing! I have a suggestion for the nut. instead of rescaling a copy of the body, you can draw a second cylinder and a pack of torus slightly bigger, like add 0,2-0,3 mm to the diameter and keeping the same space between the center of the faces of the cutted torus (sorry, I'm not a native english speaker, it's hard with technical terms). you do a little more of work, but I think in that way you should have enough clearance between the nut and the bolt and keep the same threading steps as the bolt (if it's not the good term, I mean the space between each centers of the torus). I didn't tried this method yet, but I think it will improve the result. once again, thanks for your job :)
Eytaris Thanks for the tip. I am going to try it and see if that could be a better way. the scaling method for handling tolerance is not as good as I would like, but it seems to handle the variety of tolerances with the 3D printers I have used (some printers are more accurate than others)
Alan Martyka That is a really cool idea I am going to try that out and see if it makes a big difference. Now that I think about it I have seen some bolts out there where the threading does not go all the way down to the end and the shaft is thinner at that end. I assume that is the reason!
A much faster method... make the bottom 2 halves of the torus. Once you connect the two faces so it's one spiral, copy the spiral and mirror it with a rotation. Join it to the first two with snap. Then copy all of those torus pieces, paste them, and snap the end face of the first set with the starting face of the copy. Now do that with ALL of the torus pieces, and copy/snap again. The workload gets exponentially smaller the more copies you make!
There's an easier way. Simply go to mcmaster.com Do a search for the bolt you want. ie 5/16-18 Hex head bolt 2.5" long find the Mcmaster product code - ie 90201A231 Click on it A window saying product detail will pop up Product Detail Scroll down until you see a window 3-D Models 3-D EDRW3-D I GES3-D PDF3-D SAT3-D Solidworks 3-D STEP Choose 3-D STEP and download the file and import it into 123D Design. You can fiddle with implanting the bolt into a solid, then subtracting it, to leave the threads inside the solid. Works like a charm.
Really nice tutorial. I am having a heck of a time with 123d, so it's nice to see someone else showing how to do things but not everything going entirely as planned. Any more tutorials in the works?
I would not have thought of it to do it with a Torus and yes you are getting only approximations of a helix because you make the cut at 180 deg. If you make the angle smaller by adding more lines through the origin at different angles to make the cuts you get closer to a true torus. Another reason for the tight fit is when you use the uniformly scaled copy of the bolt as a cutout of your nut it also scales in the vertical (z) direction. For longer nuts/bolts you can get more mismatch in pitch forcing you to scale even more. Try to see what happens if you use non-uniform scaling and leave the z-direction unchanged. That would probably get you a scaling that is constant with different thread overlap lengths and forces will distribute evenly along the threads of the bolt and the nut. It keeps beeing a little nasty to use the same torus for both inner-thread and outer-thread, so it would be an idea to build up te same thread pitches but using a smaller minor radius for the bolt and slightly larger minor torus radius for nut.
Dude, the reason your threads are difficult is likely that you're scaling uniform. Scale horizontal only, and your threads will still count the same. As is, your thread count is very slightly off during scaling. Good lesson thanks!
If printing bolts and nuts takes so much effort and time, i think it's more practical to get a tube of superglue to connect things together. But it's a nice challenge to make bolts and nuts i think!
I used this method at first to create screw threads and spring, but found out that this is not a true spiral even it might looks like one. Try to cut a donut by half then put together slanted as if you did in cad, you will see it is a distorted spiral.
Oh boy! 2 days of cursing you before now praising you. Yup, commands are slightly different on a PC, but stubbornness will pay off. That final cut took the longest, trying different methods before it finally worked. Going outlines only view really helped. You, 5 minutes, me 3 days.
Thanks for the video. I'm a noob at this, after creating the taurus and the cylinder, I am having trouble putting the taurus on top of cylinder. The objects are not responding to one another like they are in your video. Do you have any ideas? Thank you.
Scaling the negative bolt changes the thread pitch. That is why you are having trouble putting them together and taking them apart. You need to scale in only the XY directions to keep the pitch the same. Unfortunately, I don't know if that is possible to do.
You actually need a Z scaling as well (for smooth screw travel), but only on the torus halves, when making the screw that will be subtracted from the bolt. Make the cylinder of that screw a bit thicker, and thicker torus halves, but keep the same pitch. A great tutorial.
Thanks for the video - though as I go through this I'm trying to figure out how your design works, and from what I'm looking at it should totally bind up. The angle of the split torus is fine on opposite sides. but on the joining sides that angle is no longer consistent. It's more of a wavy shape - not a linear ramp. Did you do something different to compensate for that?
BarranteMotion Its funny I had not really noticed that until I read this! The reason it still works is likely attributable to the tolerances of the printer and how we make a slightly larger version of the bolt to produce the screw threads. If you tried to print these with too little accounting for inaccuracies in the printer it would probably bind up badly.
Nice but wrong tutorial. This is not a true spiral. At the points where the half spirals join the angle is 0. There it is horizontal to the base. Will not work well.
hello Calvin Echols my name is Tobias rabelink i work with 123d design as well can you make a video of how designing a siren rotor and stator??? best regards Tobias
what version are you using? in my version 2.2.14 the ring will not automatically center on top of my cylinder. it attaches the outside edge of the ring to the inside edge of the cylinder making it offset. please help its driving me nuts.
Good question. At the time I made this video I just needed something to fasten pieces together, so the type of threading was not the important factor. I figured that people could alter the methods I show in the video to suite their needs. That is also why the threads not being a true spiral was not a big factor to me. Since this video I have learned OpenSCAD and the only limits I have found are your imagination, but there is the hurdle for some of having to program with it and math. Id like to make the same video again with OpenSCAD for people to create mechanically accurate nuts and bolts!
I asked because one reason people would be interested in making such parts is to replace a specific nut/bolt/screw that might be broken, hard to replace, or of such poor quality they want to use a higher grade of metal for added strength or other properties. For instance, classic car restoration, vintage machinery, legacy computer parts and the like. There is a trade off in how much time you want to spend in the design process and the actual making of the part/build. There are some useful apps that allow people to refer to screw sizes and other machining reference charts, even while mobile, which is a great resource for people making repairs or calling in specs from the road. FYI, the video had my attention right up to that point, and then I was scratching my head as to why someone would spend time on a design of a part that had no specific thread. It was not even comparable to say, and isotropic (ideal) antenna concept. I say this not to be negative, but to alert you that others similarly trained might have the same reaction I did. We want ot encourage good instructables. Keep at it.
but it doesn't need to be a true spiral to act as a nut and bolt, have you not seen kids toys with plastic nuts and bolts, they look exactly the same as this and still function the same
@AttitudeOfGratitude I do not, since I made this video I learned that Fusion 360 has a maker license that allows for free use if you meek the conditions of the license. Its more complicated, but its a parametric cad system, so its a lot better for more complex designs!
It is hard to select both halves of the torus when trying to make a copy. When I click to select on one half, it gets highlighted fine, but when I click on the other, the first one get unselected. How do I do it correctly?
You can't make a bolt like this! No wonder you need a scale-factor of 109%()which should not be necessary). The threads are not inclining in the areas around the joints between the halves... 13:05 and you'll see what I mean.
Keda_P Yeah I thought about that while I was doing it, but I messed something up and just cut that part of the video out... You can probably tell that I knew there was a better way, but it still worked just slower I suppose :-)
Calvin Echols To speed it up even more, especially later, don't forget to combine objects. (Less objects that the app has to track, faster manipulation.) So once you make your initial spiral, combine it together. Then copy and past it, snap it to the first spiral, combine, then copy past snap combine... I did this about three times, and I had a spiral structure about a third the length needed, I then simply pasted that third three times, snapped them together, and combined them, then combine them to the shaft. This created a single screw structure, which was easy and fast to manipulate (you could see your computer's lag in trying to select and move all of those little pieces, MUCH faster when they are one piece). Reducing object count, and reducing duplicate effort (by factoring out movement steps before replication) will greatly improve both your speed as well as the computers.
Excellent tutorial! I would suggest Grouping the two halves of the threads prior to copying them so they act as a single 360 degree object. Would cut your workload in half I would think! Keep up the good work :)
+Houston Firefox I wondered about that myself. Seems the next piece to do.
When the nut threads appeared I literally dropped a piece of cake in my tea.
Good job! This will get me started with a project I've been putting off because, I had no idea how to make the bolt and threads. Thank You!
Thank you very much! This makes absolute sense to this super noob. This process is how I would go about it as a noob.
Thanks! This is the easiest way I have seen to create threads.
Thanks for this - I found 123D somewhat infuriating whilst following along, but did get there in the end.
I tested one change: I made one nut the way you show, scaling the subtractive thread uniformly. Then I made a second nut, scaling the thread component in X & Y only. The second nut spins much more freely on the bolt, as the thread pitch (Z scale) matches that of the bolt.
Jonathan Sanderson Interesting! I noticed the other day that if you change the slicer settings so that the permitter width is the same as your nozzle diameter, you get pieces that fit together much better. This is however at the cost of the strength of the part if it is not solid. I will have to try out your method. Thanks!
This absolutely blows my mind buddy. Fantastic work and I love the final outcome! Keep up the good work!
I really enjoyed this tutorial thank you very much. very light hearted and easy to watch. keep up the good work
Yes, those are very light and can be replaced to lots of heavy metal bolt and nut for weight reduction purpose. And I found tinkercad is very easy tool cause they have community shape menu which has lots of famous standard template format and so I can reduce the time for producing input file.
really good idea, thanks for sharing! I have a suggestion for the nut. instead of rescaling a copy of the body, you can draw a second cylinder and a pack of torus slightly bigger, like add 0,2-0,3 mm to the diameter and keeping the same space between the center of the faces of the cutted torus (sorry, I'm not a native english speaker, it's hard with technical terms). you do a little more of work, but I think in that way you should have enough clearance between the nut and the bolt and keep the same threading steps as the bolt (if it's not the good term, I mean the space between each centers of the torus). I didn't tried this method yet, but I think it will improve the result. once again, thanks for your job :)
Eytaris Thanks for the tip. I am going to try it and see if that could be a better way. the scaling method for handling tolerance is not as good as I would like, but it seems to handle the variety of tolerances with the 3D printers I have used (some printers are more accurate than others)
Calvin
Put a chamfer on the end of the bolt thread and the top and bottom of the nut should have a chamfer to provide a lead to start the thread.
Alan Martyka That is a really cool idea I am going to try that out and see if it makes a big difference. Now that I think about it I have seen some bolts out there where the threading does not go all the way down to the end and the shaft is thinner at that end. I assume that is the reason!
A much faster method... make the bottom 2 halves of the torus. Once you connect the two faces so it's one spiral, copy the spiral and mirror it with a rotation. Join it to the first two with snap. Then copy all of those torus pieces, paste them, and snap the end face of the first set with the starting face of the copy. Now do that with ALL of the torus pieces, and copy/snap again. The workload gets exponentially smaller the more copies you make!
There's an easier way. Simply go to mcmaster.com
Do a search for the bolt you want. ie 5/16-18 Hex head bolt 2.5" long
find the Mcmaster product code - ie
90201A231
Click on it A window saying product detail will pop up Product Detail
Scroll down until you see a window
3-D Models
3-D EDRW3-D I
GES3-D PDF3-D
SAT3-D
Solidworks
3-D STEP
Choose
3-D STEP and download the file and import it into 123D Design.
You can fiddle with implanting the bolt into a solid, then subtracting it, to leave the threads inside the solid. Works like a charm.
3 days doing via this video, 2 minutes going McMaster-Carr! Thanks for the information!
Michael Caswell AWSOME tip, thanks you saved me hours. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Very cool!
Yes, it is. Pity 123D design is being phased out. I have to learn Fusion 360 now - darn!
Wonderfull! Thank you:-)
Really nice tutorial. I am having a heck of a time with 123d, so it's nice to see someone else showing how to do things but not everything going entirely as planned. Any more tutorials in the works?
Nice tutorial, Calvin! This helps me a lot on getting start to make a model for 3D printing :D
MustangGT6513 Thanks for the feedback! 3D printing opened up a whole new world to me!
thank you! My first step toward 3d printing is right here :)
I would not have thought of it to do it with a Torus and yes you are getting only approximations of a helix because you make the cut at 180 deg. If you make the angle smaller by adding more lines through the origin at different angles to make the cuts you get closer to a true torus. Another reason for the tight fit is when you use the uniformly scaled copy of the bolt as a cutout of your nut it also scales in the vertical (z) direction. For longer nuts/bolts you can get more mismatch in pitch forcing you to scale even more. Try to see what happens if you use non-uniform scaling and leave the z-direction unchanged. That would probably get you a scaling that is constant with different thread overlap lengths and forces will distribute evenly along the threads of the bolt and the nut. It keeps beeing a little nasty to use the same torus for both inner-thread and outer-thread, so it would be an idea to build up te same thread pitches but using a smaller minor radius for the bolt and slightly larger minor torus radius for nut.
Really helped me complete my uni project. Thank u s.m man
EXCELLENT VIDEO.
@calvin do you have any techniques to do the thread against a cone with a variable radius and not a cylinder? Thanks
Dude, the reason your threads are difficult is likely that you're scaling uniform. Scale horizontal only, and your threads will still count the same. As is, your thread count is very slightly off during scaling. Good lesson thanks!
Awesome tutorial and very helpful. Thanks a lot!
Amaaazing. Thank you so much
If printing bolts and nuts takes so much effort and time, i think it's more practical to get a tube of superglue to connect things together. But it's a nice challenge to make bolts and nuts i think!
I used this method at first to create screw threads and spring, but found out that this is not a true spiral even it might looks like one. Try to cut a donut by half then put together slanted as if you did in cad, you will see it is a distorted spiral.
Great tutorial! Thanks for posting.
Dude you are amazing well done
Great job!! This has been a very helpful video. Please keep up the good work.
What is the next best thing to 3D design as a beginner ? (i am outgrowing tinkercad)
I need to make kind of a s shaped pipe in 3d
Oh boy! 2 days of cursing you before now praising you. Yup, commands are slightly different on a PC, but stubbornness will pay off. That final cut took the longest, trying different methods before it finally worked. Going outlines only view really helped. You, 5 minutes, me 3 days.
Thanks for the video. I'm a noob at this, after creating the taurus and the cylinder, I am having trouble putting the taurus on top of cylinder. The objects are not responding to one another like they are in your video. Do you have any ideas? Thank you.
Scaling the negative bolt changes the thread pitch. That is why you are having trouble putting them together and taking them apart. You need to scale in only the XY directions to keep the pitch the same. Unfortunately, I don't know if that is possible to do.
+Richard Weaver Yes you can scale only on the XY plane. There is a drop down menu on the scale tool to change it to non-uniform.
You actually need a Z scaling as well (for smooth screw travel), but only on the torus halves, when making the screw that will be subtracted from the bolt. Make the cylinder of that screw a bit thicker, and thicker torus halves, but keep the same pitch.
A great tutorial.
Thanks Calvin,
Very Helpful!
Do it think it would be better to reduce the size of the screw by .5mm after you made the nut?
Thanks for the video - though as I go through this I'm trying to figure out how your design works, and from what I'm looking at it should totally bind up. The angle of the split torus is fine on opposite sides. but on the joining sides that angle is no longer consistent. It's more of a wavy shape - not a linear ramp. Did you do something different to compensate for that?
BarranteMotion Its funny I had not really noticed that until I read this! The reason it still works is likely attributable to the tolerances of the printer and how we make a slightly larger version of the bolt to produce the screw threads. If you tried to print these with too little accounting for inaccuracies in the printer it would probably bind up badly.
great tutorial. Some commands different from the Mac as I have the PC version. Thanks!
Nice but wrong tutorial. This is not a true spiral. At the points where the half spirals join the angle is 0. There it is horizontal to the base. Will not work well.
hi, very nice tutorial, I am sure I will find this helpfull.
This is a great tutorial. Thanks so much!
you should try fusion 360 you can just click the surface and select thread pitch to suit your needs much faster
Thanks for sharing the tips!
Great tutorial, thanks!
I liked your video keep up the good work!
Thank you for sharing, very helpful
That's awesome nice job
+Adam Huff Thanks man I appreciate the feedback!
I too have a Robo 3d R1 Plus!!!
Same :)
Well done! amazing!
Great video!
thanks man,
nice tutorial..
hello Calvin Echols
my name is Tobias rabelink i work with 123d design as well can you make a video of how designing a siren rotor and stator???
best regards Tobias
what version are you using? in my version 2.2.14 the ring will not automatically center on top of my cylinder. it attaches the outside edge of the ring to the inside edge of the cylinder making it offset. please help its driving me nuts.
how to have cross hair mesh inside the nut and bolts for cheap production?
Thank you!
Thank you! Great!
curious why there was not a reference to the number of threads per inch for the project, which would determine coarse threading or fine threading?
Good question. At the time I made this video I just needed something to fasten pieces together, so the type of threading was not the important factor. I figured that people could alter the methods I show in the video to suite their needs. That is also why the threads not being a true spiral was not a big factor to me. Since this video I have learned OpenSCAD and the only limits I have found are your imagination, but there is the hurdle for some of having to program with it and math. Id like to make the same video again with OpenSCAD for people to create mechanically accurate nuts and bolts!
I asked because one reason people would be interested in making such parts is to replace a specific nut/bolt/screw that might be broken, hard to replace, or of such poor quality they want to use a higher grade of metal for added strength or other properties. For instance, classic car restoration, vintage machinery, legacy computer parts and the like. There is a trade off in how much time you want to spend in the design process and the actual making of the part/build. There are some useful apps that allow people to refer to screw sizes and other machining reference charts, even while mobile, which is a great resource for people making repairs or calling in specs from the road. FYI, the video had my attention right up to that point, and then I was scratching my head as to why someone would spend time on a design of a part that had no specific thread. It was not even comparable to say, and isotropic (ideal) antenna concept. I say this not to be negative, but to alert you that others similarly trained might have the same reaction I did. We want ot encourage good instructables. Keep at it.
Gj, that is PLA filament?
+xdanano Yes it is!
Wish there was an easier method but thanks for the video anyway.
Not a true spiral thread. It's more complicated to do than that.
If this does the job at hand I don't see point in using a more complex method.
It doesn't do the job. It's not a thread. It's not a spiral.
what do you mean, he said it has worked on many other occasions
What do you mean? That's not a true spiral. The only way to do a true spiral in 123D Design is to use loft.
but it doesn't need to be a true spiral to act as a nut and bolt, have you not seen kids toys with plastic nuts and bolts, they look exactly the same as this and still function the same
somehow my angles are overlapping on each other when i create the threads to little extent... what can i do?
Why when I want to make a copy of the screw.
The program closes
Free version software
Thx
Are you still using 123D?
@AttitudeOfGratitude I do not, since I made this video I learned that Fusion 360 has a maker license that allows for free use if you meek the conditions of the license. Its more complicated, but its a parametric cad system, so its a lot better for more complex designs!
you couldn't use vertical array?
thats what i was thinking he was going to do
It is hard to select both halves of the torus when trying to make a copy. When I click to select on one half, it gets highlighted fine, but when I click on the other, the first one get unselected. How do I do it correctly?
+Mussie Tesfay hold shift while clicking to add, hold alt while clicking to remove
that was a right fing video long winded but mint
Thank U bro!
I'm having a bit of difficulty with 123d design. Could someone please help me?
split solid did not work for me :( I followed every step, and when I clicked the line that red rectangle popped up and disappear in a moment.
control copy & paste way faster good vid though
Excuse as it duplicates the thread of the bolt
You can't make a bolt like this! No wonder you need a scale-factor of 109%()which should not be necessary). The threads are not inclining in the areas around the joints between the halves... 13:05 and you'll see what I mean.
Could have snapped first and then copied, then snap and copy.
:)
Keda_P Yeah I thought about that while I was doing it, but I messed something up and just cut that part of the video out... You can probably tell that I knew there was a better way, but it still worked just slower I suppose :-)
Calvin Echols Yeah, nice Job. I am a total newb. Installed the 123d yesterday.
Calvin Echols To speed it up even more, especially later, don't forget to combine objects. (Less objects that the app has to track, faster manipulation.) So once you make your initial spiral, combine it together. Then copy and past it, snap it to the first spiral, combine, then copy past snap combine... I did this about three times, and I had a spiral structure about a third the length needed, I then simply pasted that third three times, snapped them together, and combined them, then combine them to the shaft. This created a single screw structure, which was easy and fast to manipulate (you could see your computer's lag in trying to select and move all of those little pieces, MUCH faster when they are one piece). Reducing object count, and reducing duplicate effort (by factoring out movement steps before replication) will greatly improve both your speed as well as the computers.
+James Brown Very true!
Just a note as I wasted some time trying to do this. This is not a proper bolt as defined in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread
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