Custom Protractor

thingiverse

Funny story as to why I designed this. For a homework assignment we had to make a drawing of a part that had an angled region. I didn't have a protractor on me, and our professor never gave us one, and I didn't want to go out and buy a whole kit for one. I have a 3D printer in my dorm, so I decide to search "protractor" on Thingiverse and the first couple of results pages didn't even have protractors, just one dude's things (at least that's what came up at the time of that search). The actual protractors that I did find didn't even have a hash mark for every degree, just at 5- or 10-degree intervals, and I thought it was stupid that there were only those and none of the latter (the kind I was looking for). I eventually found [acilia's Protractor and Metric Ruler](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:991775) and tried printing its [remix](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5837011), but the hash marks were printed as thin, raised lines that broke off very easily. I found [another protractor design](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3277463), but I was already frustrated and didn't trust this one, and it also doesn't have the numbers at the 10-degree intervals, being a minimal protractor. That's when I realized that clear, printed protractors had a lot of advantages over printed ones, and I remembered that even then some clear protractors were better than others. So that's when I decided that I was gonna design a 3D-printable protractor that would replicate some of the advantages of stock protractors, as well as add some custom features.