A Unique 3D Printed Screw Connection

As someone who has spent a bit of time in Fusion, but mostly learning via intuition and looking up specific tools, I found the way you designed this part very interesting. The whole "draw first, constrain later" thing you were doing was like witchcraft.

I appreciate you showing the problems with the first version (the angle & the problem with driving screws) rather than just editing it away and pretending it didn't happen. Helps me to know what to avoid.

You said the word "connection" 16 times in the first 2 minutes of the video so I subscribed

If you are using a lot of heatset inserts then it makes sense to get a soldering iron tip designed for it rather than just using a normal soldering iron tip. You can get sets pretty cheap for quite a few types of soldering iron. The ones I use from CNC Kitchens store for the pinecil has a thinner shaft than your soldering iron and has specific screw on tips of each size of insert, they have a cylinder on the end that matches the inside diameter of the inserts so it helps protect the threads too so they don’t get full of plastic. They also help to hold the insert concentric to the shaft so you don’t needs to try to wiggle and push it about to get it in straight or flush.

Hats off to centuries of Japanese ingenuity that crated the most brilliant form of joinery on the planet.

The wave design gives you a wonderfully large surface area for gluing too, if you don't want to bolt or screw them together. I like that fact that it would be self aligning too.

Instead of screws, a wedge that clicks in place would also be deeply pleasing 😊

Thank you for taking the time to produce this series. I really enjoy these deep dives into one focussed aspect of 3D printing. The knowledge gained is a rising tide that lifts all ships.

i haven't even watched the video through, but i just gotta applaud you for actually making a very comprehensive, easy to digest step by step guide on how to make this. Not too much fill, very straight forward, and just a very good tutorial, very nice job. If most teachers could convey information at the same efficiency as you, i might've actually had listened in elementary math class.

Your tone makes the videos almost like ASMR.

It would be super interesting to see a non-planar implementation of this design and how that would affect tolerances of the joint fit. Or even changing the angle of print to be more vertical or rotated 90 degrees to prevent that stair stepping effect. Excellent work, really cool to see!

(Please read till the end) Thanks. I truly appreciate these videos. I've got years of real-world experience joining thousands of kilometres of heavy-duty plastic pipelines in the Oil & Gas industry. I used to hate the idea of plastic pipelines and avoided them as long as possible...but eventually I did. We "welded" plastic pipeline with various industry methods, and they had to pass inspection, and pressure testing. To calibrate the welder, the engineers cut out those joints to visually inspect a cross-section, and get an x-ray (radiography, like steel welds) we'd perform a few more tests, looking for various characteristics, and almost always, the joints are "stronger" than the rest of the pipe (when done right. I'm a retired oil & Gas pipefitter, but I came up through B-pressure welding, and heavy machinery operator (depending on the season) and oil-rigs as a teenager (a very long time ago😂) I've never even thought of it before right now, for some reason, but I wonder, wouldn't it make sense to weld these joints instead of mechanically joining them? I apologize if this has already been explained in one of the videos, that I didn't catch.

I want to note that Gyroid infill allows you to fill your 3D prints with resin, making the final product A LOT stronger.

This is way more complex than the version just using two wedges and it requires purchased hardware. The simple version you showed uses only plastic you print yourself, it is brilliant. I now use it for light strong joints with no need to buy hardware. Thank you.

"Let me waste 14 minutes of your time explaining exactly how I made these two things that are obviously not very good and which I don't test in this video."

Nice - note that you can cut a body using a sketch line - no need to extrude a surface. Obviously only relevant for the first cut - the complex cutting tool needs to be a surface - very elegant btw.

You can put in the heatset inserts from the other side, making them even stronger

the connection series is the business! i found your channel at the exact moment i needed to find more info/inspiration on this topic. very professional and concise! thank you for the time and effort you put into this

Absolute gold, a continuing series on joinery would be sick

A much simpler way of designing such a "sine wave" connection is to draw the sketch of the profile in the cross section and extrude it along a path of the connection, this way you only need two sketches instead of 5 or 6. That way you get a properly defined shape without that "flat" intersecting area in the big connection surface. Also you can draw this shape independently on the two parts which is great for reusability.