Customizable Hinge

thingiverse

I needed a hinge for a project I'm working on, so I figured why not parameterize it? That way, I can easily crank out a different hinge if I need one someday. This is my first attempt at printing interlocking parts on the Form 2. It's still a work in progress until I'm sure it prints well and I clean up the code a bit. The default settings create a hinge with four sections, each section ten millimeters in length, with an outer diameter of five millimeters. The hinge pin is two millimeters, and there is at least point five millimeters of play between any adjacent parts. Tweaking settings should lead to obvious results. Keep in mind what your printer is capable of here. It's really easy to get a wall that's too thin or spacing between parts that's too tight for your printer. Print Settings Printer Brand: Formlabs Printer: Form 1 Notes: There are two obvious ways to print this. The first is all at once with the hinge pin printed in place, but that doesn't work well on an SLA printer. It's too hard to get uncured resin out from around the pin and you end up with a hinge that doesn't move well. The other way to print this is to do the pin separately. You can use the part parameter in the customizer to spit out STLs for either or both sides, the hinge pin, and a cap for the pin. How I Designed This This ended up being a lot more involved than I expected. I figured a hinge was a pretty simple construct - just splat a few cylinders together and print the hinge pin in place and I'd be done in an hour or so. The first version did go together that quickly, but I found that the hinge sections needed better binding to the sides, printing in place isn't necessarily the right answer, etc., etc. In the end, I have eight or so hours in this project. Not too bad, but a lot more work than I expected. I think I'll be pretty happy with it on projects that need a hinge though. It'll be nice to be able to easily add hinges to my projects that are exactly tuned to my needs.