Hi,
I’ve been learning how to use FreeCAD and this is the resulting project, a pen holder for drawing. It was a good first learning project for me, perhaps for others too. The idea behind this is just to have a narrow bit at the tip and let gravity keep it going down to the surface, with a weight on top, like a drill bit or something. Lots of holes and slots for zip tie assist and to look nice. 5mm holes to use for attaching each half, so m5 bolts or just put a zip tie through. The pic below was made in foamular, but I started with a mdf version.
I used FreedCAD 0.19, vastly superior to 0.18 wrt the path workbench (the CAM bit), I tried both part design with constraints and just primitives with boolean operations using the Part workbench. The Part workbench I thought was the more advanced version, until I actually had to do anything with it and make changes, it’s essentially a do over at that point.
Few FreeCAD Tips:
- right click on your project and turn off auto-recalc. Just recalc objects after editing, too slow otherwise.
- DO save a template when you first create a job in the Path workbench, FreeCAD thinks repetition is good for you. I disagree, I could go on, but won’t. Set you post processor, defaults for 3d pocket etc, go to the first tab and save template, it needs a named pattern job_xxxx, or it won’t find it when you create a job.
- use negative values for pass extension, and use pass extension, it cleans up corners and thin walls.
- use step over percent of 70 or less for spiral drilling, that avoids leavind a middle bit.
- units are per second, which will generate high feed rates, set things to 8mm/s xy and 4 mm/s z. That gives you the F300 range.
- I did up my own post processor for marlin, the grbl ones will not fully work, comment out unsupported gcodes.
- Finally, don’t be intimidated, the core functionality for just doing things is a handful of bits of code, the rest doesn’t apply.
Cheers!
penholder.gcode (220.8 KB)
penholderfreecad.zip (772.3 KB)
