Modified Parametric Pin Connectors (Round and Pointed, with Customizer)

thingiverse

It's often essential to join multiple 3D-printed components together, either to enable one of the parts to rotate or due to limitations in the printing process such as build size, preventing overhangs, or printing in multiple materials. These pins allow you to do that fairly easily when designing the parts, and it's often not necessary to use glue at all (although you can use glue if you want to ensure it will never come apart). I have included three different sizes of pin, along with the ability to create almost any sized custom pins as well. The standard pins are approximately 25mm long, with a socket diameter of 7mm, while the small ones are about half that size, and the tiny ones are as small as I can make them reliably. You can optionally give the pins (and sockets) rounded ends, which shortens them slightly for the same strength, but I think the points increase the alignment stability. This design is modified from Emmett's rather excellent pin connectors: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:213310. I had been intending to design something very similar to this, and then found it had already been done :-). The main change to this is the addition of further parameterisation, which allows a much wider range of size to be specified, as many people have been looking for a way to make the pins much smaller. STL files for the pin and socket, both fixed and free, are included for three sizes. The one named pin-round-standard should be compatible with Emmet's, and it should fit in the same sockets, although its own socket is shorter. The small one is my original small pin size, and the tiny one is about as small as I have tried to make it so far, although smaller is probably possible... As of 2018-11-18, I made some very minor changes in how the preload works today. I have again heavily refactored this from my previous version (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3210316), to add support for both rounded and pointed pins, and to allow it to work with the customizer. Rounded pins allow them to be shorter for a given size and strength, but pointed ones are probably more stable in the holes.