How-to Design Print in Place Hinges | Design for Mass Production 3D Printing
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
- Learn more about Teleport:
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Print-in-place hinges can be tricky, but with the right design techniques, you can create strong, reliable, and fully functional hinges straight off the print bed-no supports needed! In this video, we break down the key principles of designing print-in-place hinges that actually work, from material selection to layer orientation and hinge geometry.
You'll learn:
✅ How to prevent weak, brittle, or fused hinges
✅ The best print orientations for strength and durability
✅ Common hinge design mistakes and how to avoid them
Whether you're designing for personal projects or selling 3D-printed products, mastering hinge design is essential for creating robust, professional-grade parts. Plus, if you're looking to sell your 3D prints without running a print farm, check out Teleport, our 3D print-on-demand service that lets you upload your models, and sell prints without the hassle of running a print farm.
#3dprinting #3dprinted #3dprintingideas #designfor3dprinting
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About Slant 3D
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Produced by Geometry Media
man, we gonna need 507 3d mechanisms book soon
Not a bad idea
@@slant3d send me a pre-print copy *wink wink*
That might actually be a coffee table book that I'd pay 20 bucks for.😂 @@slant3d
@@slant3dseriously, I need this!
@slant3d should I upload my model to teleport in the orientation I want it printed, or will you guys adjust for best result? Also what have you been working on? I know mechanic hands when I see them 😂
Thanks!
Thank you
5:55 I did essentially the same thing shown on screen with two important differences:
1. I printed it the other way around. Cones/chevrons started small at the bottom, and grew wider as they grew taller.
2. This sounds crazy, but stay with me: the two pieces of the hinge were actually connected as one solid body. The connection was a 2 mm diameter cylinder, vertically oriented connecting the concave bottom of one Chevron to the beginning tip of the next.
It's a little crazy, but during use, the center just has to break. I thought this would be a cringe inducing application of force, but in fact, just taking the part of the print bed was enough to prime the hinge.
The results were amazingly good. The hinge has very little play (it's literally zero tolerance) and the feel is buttery smooth. Until you try it, you won't get it. It's like the extra plastic in there acts like a lubricant or something.
Gabe likes chunky hinges, but the one I printed was a relatively slender 10 mm diameter total, and WAY stronger than I imagined it would be. I put one of the prints in a vice to do a destructive test, and the body of the box failed before the hinge did.
I only printed this about 6 times and I kept making the center connecting cylinder bigger until it worked at 2 mm. Next time I do it, I'll probably go bigger again. I designed it from scratch and didn't upload it anywhere, so sorry I can't point to a link.
Love these videos where you just talk over a few different ways to design the same mechanism to work better with printing.
Thanks
I'm in the process of designing something that needs hinges and I'm so glad this came out just in time!
Thank you for going over hinges. I've been meaning to investigate different ones and figuring out how to design them, but haven't gotten to it yet. This saves me some time.
You're welcome
did a couple hinges in PLA for a repair job on my escooter, and holy if they are flexible, it was a normal zig zag pattern as well. feel like they are gonna last a long time
Fantastic video!
Fantastic info - Thanks Gabe!!
Another cool thing about the double cone hinge is that it can be made very thin. I've modeled a 2mm thin hinge similar to that and use it in some of my models without issues. It's not sturdy and needs to be repeated along the axis to be reliable, though.
Please provide samples of these, particularly the green and orange guys from 4:10 to 6:00. I don’t understand how you don’t have portions printing on long cantilevers or in air.
me too
Thank you, I thought I was going crazy
I'm with you guys, but I have some of my own experience here. I did essentially the same thing shown at 5:55 with two important changes:
1. I printed it the other way around. Cones/chevrons started small at the bottom, and grew wider as they grew taller.
2. This sounds crazy, but stay with me: the two pieces of the hinge were actually connected as one solid body. The connection was a 2 mm diameter cylinder, vertically oriented connecting the concave bottom of one Chevron to the beginning tip of the next.
It's a little crazy, but during use, the center just has to break. I thought this would be a cringe inducing application of force, but in fact, just taking the part of the print bed was enough to prime the hinge.
The results were amazingly good. The hinge has very little play (it's literally zero tolerance) and the feel is buttery smooth. Until you try it, you won't get it. It's like the extra plastic in there acts like a lubricant or something.
Gabe likes chunky hinges, but the one I printed was a relatively slender 10 mm diameter total, and WAY stronger than I imagined it would be. I put one of the prints in a vice to do a destructive test, and the body of the box failed before the hinge did.
I only printed this about 6 times and I kept making the center connecting cylinder bigger until it worked at 2 mm. Next time I do it, I'll probably go bigger again. I designed it from scratch and didn't upload it anywhere, so I can't point you to an easy thing to play with.
Excellent advice! I use the principles you teach about every time i design :)
Thank you so much
This video is unhinged.
No no it seems very hinged
Liar
That sort of criticism hinges on your biases.
Awesome video, love the flex hinge
You can also make the hinges completely separate and use things like dove tails to attach. Not great for one shot print but can have cost offset by disconnecting higher risk parts and also reuse of same parts across multiple lines. Swings and roundabouts don't tunnel vision yourself, think of the whole process.
Lots of great ideas here, thanks very much for sharing!
1:26 a good improvement using idex or multi tools printer and print the hinge is a tpu while the non hindge parts are made from a pla or petg or abs. The model will have to be disgn or modified sin e you want tpu to be also wedge inside the main part for better bonding
Amazing, thank you for the info sharing
Love it! Have you done one of these for different snap designs?
It would've been nice to find some links to some sample hinge model STL files... A+ video tho
Great timing. I have been wanting to build something PIP!
Dude, PLEASE write a book or a PDF or something...
I really love your videos, you are giving out insane amounts of valuable, real-life know how on 3D printing, but it is a) difficult to internalize all that knowledge until needed for a project and b) almost impossible to find it again after some time. I will sometimes sit there and be like "Yeah, I dimly remember a Slant video where he talked about something, but which one was it?"
Having those infos in writing somewhere for reference would be invaluable. I'd even pay a few bucks for it... 🙂
I just make holes roughly the diameter of a filament strand and shove that through as a pin. Can be made small and still not easy to break. Also very repairable if it does. At the end of the day it's a multi-part linkage, and taking shortcuts to make it a 1-shot part has some drawbacks.
Thanks for the video. Any chance you could provide links to design models showing the hinge designs you demonstrated (Fusion would be preferable but whatever CAD you wirk un is fine). Not looking for anything fancy just a basic demo of each design. Would be really helpful. Thanks.
Good methods
Hmmm. I've been considering using teleport for my Amazon store products for scale, but now I'm a bit worried about quality as I've been able to utilize ironing and specific support settings to get a high quality end product. I wonder if your print farm wouldn't accommodate those types of considerations now.
Always design your product to be independent of any slicer settings. A robust design can run on any machine, any material, with any settings
@slant3d yeah but what about a sleek yet functional design? Robust sounds clunky and unappealing.
@@scott.adrianyour standards for surface finish are fine. Surface finishes are specified on any other type of manufacturing as well. The hiccup here is that your standards for the part may be beyond what Slant3d can deliver reliably. That's not a dig at Slant3D. They're providing design guidelines in light of their own capabilities. They're doing a brilliant job of setting people's expectations before they become customers so that they can deliver what you expect. It sets the relationship up to succeed. If they did tinker with slicer settings on every print just to make it succeed they would have to charge a hefty premium to make sure it's profitable and you reliably get good parts. Those of us who've been around a while know that slicer settings can be the difference between successful print or not, regardless of good geometry. 3d printers are capable of wild stuff when we tinker with settings. It's just not very scalable.
Hey, do you guys offer modeling consultation? I've been trying to prototype a small pill case with an integrated hinge that I want to mass-produce later but I've been having trouble to print it while keeping dimensional accuracy and having the hinge print well and work (I'm new to 3D modeling and 3D printing so I'm sure that there's at least one thing I'm not doing well and/or don't know). Once figured out I'd love to mass 3D print it with you guys.
what CAD do you use?
you are still using grid infill?
When will we get to see these hinges being weight tested on tangled testing?
Loved the video, super helpful. Some feedback: the background music is a bit distracting!
If I'm cranking out hundreds/thousands of these things, and I need to print a hinge in the "wrong" orientation, is it worth the effort to add custom Gcode to fire plastic down through the infill at the weak point? I'm thinking that this would, if not bond the layers better, at least provide some shear resistance by having something solid across those layers.
For the hinge at 2:12 which tolerances do you suggest, to avoid that the fuse together? Do you use support between the two parts? thanks
No support in any of them. always make the tolerances as large as you can for the application. Generally at least 0.25mm
Ton Fusion est en français, tu viens du Quebec??
Like these videos, any chance of one on parts that csn pop/snap together and come back apart? Trying to eliminate screws from a part.
Take a look at out old connections video
This is a good video
Thanks. Appreciate the watch
NOT
I'm guessing the interior Nubs are meant to be offset a layer or something like support material is 🤔
What if i made a pin to connect both parts?
Exactly, a pin is the answer to most of these concerns.
In mass production, where this channel is all about, you want as little post printing steps as possible. For my (single item) models I use a string of filament as “pin” but when printing hundreds of items I can imagine a little bit of modeling upfront pays off easily.
What about a traditional hinge with a pin that needs to be assembled? This seems like a no brainer to me with printing the loops on each part then even possibly printing a hinge pin or just use a nail or bolt?
I need hinges that stay in different angles, how can that be done?
will you explain hinges of glasses frame? that is different.
Wouldn't multimaterial printing/the sharpie pen adhesion breaking trick work wonders for the dual-cone hinge?
Yes but it adds a lot of extra processing which is a buzz kill for higher volume
What about multi material print in place hinges
What clearance do you recommend for teleport?
Depends on the design. Always make your parts robust. So the bigger the clearance the better
*Uses filament as hinge pins*
I mean, it could work with an automatic cuttoff system.
Wait, you can just print them in place like that? God I'm a 3D printing junior evidently, been using bolted axles this whole time. I wonder if there are any tricks for ball joints/universal joints too?
There are a few tricks to those. Hint: Cropping
"The way of doing that is basically taking this hinge, and then just making the second half of it, so that you have cone, and then back up, and then cone again. This way you are able to create something that doesn't really have the overhangs because everything blends into itself, and even though you have that center spiral, it can't break off because you have that baseline chamfered in really strong and reliable."
...what?
It *really* looks and sounds like these designs have overhangs. I have no idea what you're describing that would eliminate these.
Why is your Fusion in French?
Multitalented
Merci Gabe
@slant3d I thought that I heard an " aboot" in one of these videos...
Probably Canadian. Still... amazing content. He could have video in French and... that's where subtitles are coming in aid 😉 As Pole, I'm thankful for English, though 😂
Fusion est en français mais la vidéo est en anglais, bizarre... 🤔
🙋♂️
0:46 stop the unreasonable PLA hate
I don't see why you consider it "PLA hate" to suggest you keep your material limitations in mind. PLA can work with that type of "hinge" you just need to make sure the bend isn't as tight as what's possible with some other materials. He even said that.
I love pla
@@dtylerbPLA and petg will both do that of you fold them like he did but he chose to only hate on PLA because he is an elitiest fillamemt guru
Man, this goes by so fast that I am totally not confident of my ability to model any of those later hinges. That's a real pity.
French Fusion360 threw me off lol
whenever i see a 3d printing video, i think arc-overhangs and alternating fractional delta z-axis movement between layers for better layer adhesion. but both of those are slicer and print setting specific.
I love these videos they are suuuper informative!!! But we live in 2025... So obviously they're will be vomments on the hands.... Just watch....
I agree, i always learn a lot from this channel ... and I always see the haters looking for something to complain about lol
Good video but wash your hands 🧼
Came to say this. Glad I'm not the only one who noticed.
This is why hand models exist. People who actually do stuff have hands like Gabe.
These videos are great and super useful... I just want to say and I don't want to be mean but you could take time to take care of your hands if they're going to be shown so often in the videos. It's just a cosmetic tought and has no impact of the overall value of your content
Wash your hands before doing close-up shots like that 😬
Some of us work for a living. They are called calluses and oil.
@@slant3dwhy don't you soap smooth your hands then 🤣