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Week 02: TinkerCad

Helping my daughter with her project.

My daughter wanted to recreate the scene from the legend of King Arthur where the sword was stuck through an anvil and the marble it sat atop. We decided to 3D print the anvil, and use expanding insulating foam to make the marble it sits on. We found an anvil through Bambu Studio's online models.

Next we needed to make a hole for the sword to go through the anvil.

I decided to use TinkerCad for this project, because we only needed to subtract a rectangular hole from the center of the anvil. TinkerCad is a very simple program that uses Boolean operations, which make complicated shapes using simple shapes through subtraction and addition of those simple shapes (union, difference, intersection).

First I downloaded the file as a .3mf file, but that is not compatible with TinkerCad. I needed to save the file as an .stl. Then I imported it into TinkerCad.

Anvil imported

Next I made a rectangular hole, and aligned it to the center of the anvil on all axis.

Aligning the hole

Then I grouped the objects.

Grouped

The sizing was off as I had guessed at 1.5 inches in length. My daughter was unhappy with the size of the anvil printed directly from the file, but has not given me clear size requirements. So I enlarged the anvil, making sure to ungroup the hole so that I could recenter and regroup them after increasing the size lest the hole get bigger too. I made a variety of sizes for her to choose from.

Size differences

This will also give us backups should something happen when assembling her project. I am printing them all at once at the CLS FabLab instead of on my home printer, because my printer head is jammed. I tried to fix it yesterday, and may have made it worse. My daughter needs these for this weekend, and so I will print them tomorrow at the lab.

Anvils printed

Anvil stl file

Important notes on TinkerCad:

  1. Make sure to highlight only the object you want to group. The select tool will include anything beneath or behind the objects.
  2. Change the name of your file on the top left when you save or export. You may export any object separately on the workspace. TinkerCad only exports what is currently selected.