A Stronger Bolt

thingiverse

This is not so much a remix or new "thing". It's more of an idea. I have been using the excellent Nut_Job OpenScad program to make some nuts and bolts. They print great. However my application puts some lateral stress on the bolts and they snap quite easily along the layers. How can I make it stronger? I played around with different temperatures and fan settings. I can get the bolt quite strong using PLA at a higher temperature with no fan (to get the highest possible inter layer bond.) But the result is can be quite messy (but strong!). The best results I've had are by printing the bolt flat in two halves and then super gluing them together. This means the layer interfaces are now along the length of the bolt. As expected the "horizontal" bolts are proving to be much stronger than the "vertical" bolts. I haven't conducted any scientific / measurement tests, but for my application the difference is hugely apparent. Does anybody else have another approach? Print Settings Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: 0.2mm/layer Infill: None (solid) How I Designed This Cutting the bolt in half. I used Slic3r and the instruction to Cut the object keeping both halves. I think most slicing programs can do similar things. In Cura you'd have to duplicate the object, spin one around and then sink both half way to get the same result.