Heat Insert Press

prusaprinters

<p><strong>TL;DR</strong></p><ul><li>Heat-Insert Press to ensure proper placement of brass threads in 3D-printed Parts</li><li>Old 3D-Printer hotend gets a new life, so you don’t ruin your nice soldering tips</li><li>Custom PCB functions as a controller and mechanical part at the same time</li><li>Counterweight so the gantry doesn’t fall on your fingers</li><li>USB-C Power Delivery is cool</li></ul><p><strong>Introduction</strong></p><p>Heat inserts are small brass cylinders with a thread in it. Typically used for injection moulding, they quickly became a popular way to connect 3D-printed parts. You use them by melting the inserts into a slightly smaller hole, thus making a strong connection.</p><p>Usually, one would use a soldering iron to heat them up, and that can work very well. However, if you have large prints or use expensive filaments like PA12, you would have to be very brave to risk it without a rig - soldering irons are simply not perfect for this job.</p><p>A popular trick to make the inserts straight is to buy a special tip for the soldering iron. That would increase the reliability. And even though I don’t have such tips at hand, I think they are a great product. Not only do they prevent plastic from flowing into the thread, but you also don’t mess up your good tips for soldering.</p><p>Before making a final judgement about heat-inserts, I wanted to build a rig to be able to properly install them. Inspired by previous projects from Adafruit and maker.moekoe, I decided to take it a step further and make a custom PCB. I wanted to use a cheap hotend I had lying around, which was totally unusable for 3D-Printing, because of the poor machining quality. Being able to reuse it for the press gives it a good use.</p><p>The whole project is targeted as an inexpensive and nice way to build a press with parts I already had from previous 3D-Printing projects or that are available easily. I highly encourage you to use whatever parts you have on hand, and tried my best to model the parts parametric, so it should be little effort to adapt the printed parts.</p><p><strong>Build</strong></p><p>You can find a complete BOM with more information on my website: <a href="https://matti04.net/projects/heat-insert-press/">https://matti04.net/projects/heat-insert-press/</a>. However, I used very common parts. The controller PCB is optional, you can use any old 3D-printer Mainboard you have lying around!&nbsp;</p>