How to Pause Printing to Embed Hardware
Adding Print Pauses – Embed Hardware to Increase Your 3D Print’s Strength & Functionality
This article will walk you through how to pause printing to embed hardware. Incorporating 3D-printed parts into your manufacturing operation requires hardware. And it’s not limited to the standard fare – screws, nuts, and bolts. Magnets, dowel pins, washers, heat set inserts, metal plates – they all can be integrated with 3D printed parts!
Now, integration comes in different forms. What immediately comes to mind is designing a hole for a bolt to run through or a recessed cavity on the print’s surface to glue in a magnet. There are plenty of applications where this is successful.
But what about applications where these metal components need to remain hidden to maintain a non-marring surface, for instance? This is where adding a print pause comes in.
Take this adjustable bicycle lift. It clamps to the cantilevered edge of a table or countertop and features a vertically adjustable beam to place the bicycle’s frame and lift it off the ground. Now you can easily perform bicycle maintenance without a large, expensive bicycle stand!
This part requires two areas of vertical adjustability – the clamp and the adjustable beam. Hardware is a must here – not only does it serve the purpose of vertical adjustability, but it gives added strength to the part. Two 5/16” bolts proved invaluable, but they are only half the solution.
For every bolt, there must be a nut. To give the lift a finished look and avoid the risk of loosing the nuts, the nuts were embedded.
Remove Supports from Cavity
Now, how was this done? Eiger, Markforged’s enterprise cloud-based additive manufacturing software platform, is half slicer, half file & printer maintainer, and all parts turnkey and efficient for analyzing and printing your CAD files. Embedding these nuts was no different. Simply load the STL file into Eiger, manipulate any settings (if necessary – Markforged’s defaults are optimized to deliver parts with a high-quality surface finish, high strength, without sacrificing print time), and jump into ‘Internal View’. Let’s do this for the clamp.
Because supports are enabled as default, we first need to remove the supports generated inside the nut housing.
Select ‘2D’ and find the first floor layer of the nut housing – layer 45.
In the ‘Create New Override’ menu, select ‘Remove Supports’ from the drop-down. Select ‘Add Sketch’ and choose ‘Center Circle’ down near the timeline.
In the ‘Create New Override’ menu, select ‘Remove Supports’ from the drop-down. Select ‘Add Sketch’ and choose ‘Center Circle’ down near the timeline.
Click the center of the bolt hole and drag outwards – do not worry about oversizing it!
Choose ‘Finish Sketch’ and you’ll return to 3D mode. Drag the slider on the timeline to the left to layer 135. At this layer, the entire block of support material is encompassed. Click ‘Reslice & Save’ – the support material is now gone!
Configure Print to Pause
To capture this nut with a Print Pause, first identify the roof layer for this nut – enter the 2D mode for easier identification.
Layer 121 shows the first roof layer. If we put the pause here, though, nut placement would be impossible, so step one layer below the roof layer – layer 120.
At layer 120, click ‘Create New Override’ in the upper right corner. Select ‘Insert Pause’ – the bottom-most selection. Save and click ‘Print’. As you might expect, once layer 120 finishes, the print head will move away from the print to give you access to drop in the nut. Because Eiger is cloud-based, you will receive an email notification of the pause, so there’s no worry about forgetting! The print screen will look like this:
After you’ve dropped the nut into its cavity, click ‘Resume’ on the print screen and walk away! Didn’t I say it was turnkey?
Note: When you’re designing the nut’s cavity, you must add a clearance between the nut and its first roof layer. Otherwise, the nut will be flush with the pause layer, so the print head could strike the nut when the print is resumed, causing a print failure. For this clamp, there is a 0.3 mm clearance.
Notice there are clearances between the nut and cavity walls. If you are unsure what value you should design your clearance, print a unit test and iterate if necessary. There is a technical guide on this topic – please refer to it for more information!
As mentioned earlier, embedded hardware is not limited to nuts and bolts. Centerline Engineered Solutions used bent steel inserts embedded within Markforged’s strong printable composite base material, Onyx, to create extremely durable press brake punches. Because Centerline is often employed in fabricating parts in low volumes, they needed a way to justify the high cost of custom tooling. Markforged was the only answer.
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Have a question or want to learn more about making durable industrial-grade parts with a 3D Printer? Our experts are always ready to help, contact us today!
