Customizable Hole Size Tester

thingiverse

This customizer lets you spit out a very simple object -- a block with holes in it. But that block has been really useful to me, and I hope it's useful to you too. * Not sure what size hole you need in your design to fit a real-world object? Print out all the plausible-sized holes at once and find out, rather than using trial and error. * Not sure how much your printer is altering the design size of holes? Print this out, measure the actual size of the holes versus the design size, and find out. * Adjusting your print settings to try to make small holes more consistent? Print this out and see what effects your settings changes have made. I've only been designing and printing 3D objects for a couple of weeks, but I've already learned that Small Holes Are A Problem -- especially when that small hole 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 hole 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 "polyholes". Polygons (squares, pentagons, etc.) tend to shrink less than more circular holes, at least at small sizes. But sometimes polyholes don't work right for other reasons -- there's too little contact with whatever object is intended to go through the hole, or the hole just doesn't look right even though it's functional. This customizer simply prints out a range of holes in whatever size you want, using both the basic circular holes and the standard "polyholes" implementation. The default settings will give you a plausible range of holes for letting 2.85mm filament pass through an object -- useful for dry boxes, filament clips, and so on.