Design for Additive Manufacture

Lesson 1: Traditional Manufacturing V Additive Manufacturing - Understanding how an FDM printer works will help the user to gain an appreciation for the machine and what level of detail it can produce.

Lesson 2: How to Optimise Models for 3D printing - This lesson will detail the steps which should be carried out prior to starting a print to ensure the printer is set up correctly.

Lesson 3: Making the Most Out of the 3D Printing Process - In order to get an aesthetically pleasing finish from a 3D print, it is important to consider the file that is provided to the printer. How we extract this data from SOLIDWORKS will play a role in the end result. However, there are far more peripherals we can control, which shall be explored within this lesson 3.

Lesson 4: Designing for your Printer - Understanding your printer will allow you to get a lot more out of it. May it be FDM or SLA, we can build on the techniques you learnt within those printer specific training courses you have been on with tools within the CAD and slicer.

Lesson 5: Part Consolidation - This lesson will detail the steps which should be carried out prior to starting a print to ensure the printer is set up correctly.

Lesson 6: Remove Material from the Model - SOLIDWORKS has a variety of commands to help speed up design development, within lesson 6 we shall explore how these commands can be used for setting up our files to help speed up the print time.

Lesson 7: Importing Models to Print - Continuing on the theme of how SOLIDWORKS can assist in producing designs that work well with your printer, lesson 7 shall explore the use of specific commands that ensure your parts fit within the build volume of your printer while looking out for areas of concern.

Lesson 8: A Well Designed Example - By using a familiar model that has been slightly modified for printing, we shall run through the basics of how any model can be tweaked to print in the optimal manner. Once these changes have been discussed, it’s extremely important to understand how to orient these files within your slicer to get the best possible result from it.

Lesson 9: Designing with Supports in Mind -Support material is sometimes a necessity, if there’s no way the design can be changed to reduce supports then we can look into techniques which allow us to get the best possible result from the printed output. With the use of simple rules and a further understanding of orientation, we can ensure that your printed file still achieves the aesthetic and functional performance required.

Lesson 10: How to Use your Slicer correctly - The slicer used to send the CAD data through to the printer will sometimes show us results that may not be optimal, understanding how we can still get the result required allows you to get more of your designs printed.

Lesson 11: Extra Advice - SOLIDWORKS has a whole host of commands that this course has shown to assist with the 3D printing process, and within this final lesson we shall look into even further methods that can be used to not just create functional differences, but also to create beautifully realistic surface finishes.