Customizable Hole Size Tester

thingiverse

This customizer lets you create a very simple object - a block with openings in it. But that block has been really useful to me, and I hope it's just as useful to you too. * Unsure about the size of opening you need for your design to fit a real-world object? Print out all possible-sized holes at once and find out, rather than using trial and error. * Uncertain how much your printer is altering the design size of openings? Print this out, measure the actual size of the openings versus the design size, and find out. * Adjusting your print settings to try to make small openings more consistent? Print this out and see what effects your setting changes have made. I've only been designing and printing 3D objects for a couple of weeks, but I've already learned that Small Openings Are A Problem - especially when that small opening needs to be an exact size. In addition to the normal 3D printing factors that can throw off the size of things, you run into a problem that's unique to printing small circles; when your filament-based printer extrudes a small circular line of plastic, that line will tend to collapse inward a bit, making the opening smaller than designed. To make matters worse, the amount of this shrinkage varies depending on your material, your printer, your slicer, your print settings, and possibly the phase of the moon. One strategy to reducing this problem is "polyopenings". Polygons (squares, pentagons, etc.) tend to shrink less than more circular openings, at least at small sizes. But sometimes polyopenings don't work right for other reasons - there's too little contact with whatever object is intended to go through the opening, or the opening just doesn't look right even though it's functional. This customizer simply prints out a range of openings in whatever size you want, using both the basic circular openings and the standard "polyopenings" implementation. The default settings will give you a plausible range of openings for letting 2.85mm filament pass through an object - useful for dry boxes, filament clips, and so on.