Fridge Handle

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raidho36
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Joined: Fri May 08, 2020 3:10 pm

Fridge Handle

Post by raidho36 »

My friend asked me to make him a 3d printed replacement fridge handle, because the original one broke. Had to split it up into 2 pieces so that it can print on my medium-sized bed. As a complete beginner, took me the whole day to make it! Then it printed for 10 hours.

The CAD file won't attach because it's 1.4 megabytes, and apparently it's near incompressible so zipping doesn't help.
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chrisb
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by chrisb »

raidho36 wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 3:22 pm As a complete beginner...
I wonder what you will be doing in two weeks!
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ppemawm
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by ppemawm »

raidho36 wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 3:22 pm ...(only)! took me the whole day to make it!
Wow. For a complete beginner that is quite impressive. Thanks for sharing.

I for one would like to know what workbench you used, the version number, hurdles overcome, and any particular
modelling strategy, etc.
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools..." ;)
raidho36
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by raidho36 »

ppemawm wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 6:02 pm Wow. For a complete beginner that is quite impressive. Thanks for sharing.

I for one would like to know what workbench you used, the version number, hurdles overcome, and any particular
modelling strategy, etc.
Eh I spent most of the time not actually modeling anything, but struggling to figure out how to use the tools. There was a lot of googling; I mostly went by "you do what you gotta do", there wasn't mcuh room for perfectionism. The handle has a bunch of random curves and angles everywhere so I spent a lot of time zooming 1:1 and putting a reference handle to the screen to do shape matching. I've used 0.19 but I guess 0.18 would've worked the same. Mostly used Part workbench because you can go nuts as long as it does the job for you whereas PartDesign has some restrictive rules on how you can and cannot do things.

I made a bunch of cross section profiles and swept them, but it just kept making weird kinks and bulges everywhere. The central sweep chord was a single arc but I had to make two arcs out of it just so that there was an anchor point for another profile which I hoped would fix it (I couldn't use another sketch's singular points and construction lines and it's a real bummer). I couldn't coax it into proper shape so eventually I made three different sweeps - sections of which individually looked about right - with the front-to-mid, the middle and the mid-to-rear profiles, cut them up and stitched together, the transitions didn't came perfectly smooth though. The front section actually has a huge counter-bulge modeled in to get the shape right but there's a cut for the door so it's not visible. I couldn't put a sketch on a curved surface so I had to manually move sketches and extrusions to make bolt cover recess and bolt holes of appropriate depth. Making the cutting surface was a pain because I couldn't stretch a surface between two sketches properly and when I tried it one segment at a time, one of them would come out twisted by 180 degrees. Simply sweeping between sketches produced rather weird transitions between circular and straight segments. So I made two homogeneous sketches with different proportions to approximate my original idea and loft them, and then used helper sketches to stretch additional surface over the ends so it could make a cut. Making the T-peg at the back was easy and straightforward.

For all that trouble, it came pretty close to the original though, when holding them next to each other I couldn't really tell much of a difference, beyond one of them being shiny ABS and the other being sanded PLA. Which I'm now gluing for the second time because apparently epoxy won't stick to smooth PLA and I didn't use nearly enough of it so there wasn't much contact anyway.
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GeneFC
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by GeneFC »

raidho36 wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 3:22 pm The CAD file won't attach because it's 1.4 megabytes, and apparently it's near incompressible so zipping doesn't help.
The FCStd file is already in zipped format, so that is why it cannot be further compressed by trying to zip it.

However, it is possible to make the FCStd file smaller. One of the preferences in FreeCAD is the amount of compression used when saving FCStd files. This preference is located in Edit > Preferences > General > Document

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The compression is lossless in all cases, so the only penalty for high compression levels is longer save and open times.

Gene
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ppemawm
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by ppemawm »

raidho36 wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 9:52 pm The handle has a bunch of random curves and angles everywhere so I spent a lot of time zooming 1:1 and putting a reference handle to the screen to do shape matching.
Thank you for all the interesting details.

A couple of minor comments on your work process:

Sometimes you can take a picture of the front and side views and import those images to the proper planes. These can then be scaled to actual dimensions and placed in the background when making sketches. Use the Image workbench to import the images. Scale by comparing a known dimension to the same in the sketch. The scale found in the property tab of the image is the ratio of the two.

Rather than a sweep, consider extruding the two basic profiles from the front and side view sketches. Then you can do a Part > Boolean > Common and finish off with fillets to round the edges if required. Make sure that each extrusion completely overlaps the other before the common boolean.

There are always many different ways to get the job done, but that is part of the fun exploring the options. It seems like you are well on your way, especially after succeeding with a difficult first project.
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools..." ;)
Joyas
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Re: Fridge Handle

Post by Joyas »

GeneFC wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 11:41 pm
raidho36 wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 3:22 pm The CAD file won't attach because it's 1.4 megabytes, and apparently it's near incompressible so zipping doesn't help.
The FCStd file is already in zipped format, so that is why it cannot be further compressed by trying to zip it.

However, it is possible to make the FCStd file smaller. One of the preferences in FreeCAD is the amount of compression used when saving FCStd files. This preference is located in Edit > Preferences > General > Document


Compression.PNG

The compression is lossless in all cases, so the only penalty for high compression levels is longer save and open times.

Gene
Sometimes I do the opposite: I turn off compression to let Winrar compress the FreeCAD file. This is very interesting to store the edit story of a lot of FreeCAD files (for example 20 freeCAD files), you can reduce the filesize almost like if you only had the last file.
Estudié ingeniería técnica industrial en España y sólo me ha servido para estar en el paro, no me contratan porque no tengo experiencia, y no tengo experiencia porque no me contratan. No debí estudiar esa carrera.
raidho36
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Joined: Fri May 08, 2020 3:10 pm

Re: Fridge Handle

Post by raidho36 »

ppemawm wrote: Fri May 08, 2020 11:42 pm Sometimes you can take a picture of the front and side views and import those images to the proper planes. These can then be scaled to actual dimensions and placed in the background when making sketches. Use the Image workbench to import the images. Scale by comparing a known dimension to the same in the sketch. The scale found in the property tab of the image is the ratio of the two.

Rather than a sweep, consider extruding the two basic profiles from the front and side view sketches. Then you can do a Part > Boolean > Common and finish off with fillets to round the edges if required. Make sure that each extrusion completely overlaps the other before the common boolean.
Thanks, importing reference image would've been really helpful, although I'm not sure how reliable it would be on account of perspective distortion.

The handle has almost no straight surfaces, nearly everything is curved and to a varying extent too. I'm certain that just extruding the general shape and applying some fillets would've downgraded the model from "like the original" to "fits into mounting holes". Thanks for suggestion though!
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