3D printed Design

28 September 2025

Tags: 3d printing tutorial

Personal notes before article

So, I’ve decided to try and post every Friday. This should give me enough time to work on something meaningful, while still maintaining my regular routine of gym, cooking, people I want to hang with, people I don’t want to hang with and life… it took 2 days to finish this post.

My First Box - 3D Printed Design

I wrote my name, and you should be impressed - Mint Prower

So, I’ve made a very simple dice box that really isn’t impressive enough to write a post about, but as I set myself the goal of posting an update every Friday, I’ll be writing about this. And yes, it did take me all week to get it right.

Design requirements

My design requirements was ancillary, all I wanted to make was a nice small dice box. The box needed to have about 22mm interior space to allow for a regular sized dice set. Average size is apparently 17mm, so 22 so there’s plenty of space.

Now, I should mention I had about 15 more pages of drafts and rough sketches before I made these nice clean ones.

My hands Look like this

So that yours can look like this

Pencil-Handism is a serious condition.

Mistakes

So, I had to re-measure several times for the following stupid reasons.

1. I forget I needed to double certain measurements

   

2. My objects were sketched from scratch

   So if I adjusted dimensions on one object, the other would need to be manually adjusted. Sometimes, it would be easier to delete and resketch the entire object.

3. Trying to get tolerances to work properly.

I ended up re-creating everything a few times.

The Final structure ended up being

• Base Box whose dimensions are inherit by
• Lid whose dimensions are inherited by
• lid cutout whose dimensions are inherited by
• Final box (and it also duplicates the Base Box)

This way, I can adjust the Base Box if needed, and other sizes should be adjusted in accordance to it.

The hardest issue I encountered, was adding some tolerance between the two parts so the fit properly,and I can adjust the tolerance if needed.

Tantalising Tolerance

My (probably terrible) solution was the following structure.

1. Make your base object, in my case a cube (Base Object).

2. Make a new body (Join Object) and import the geometry of the Base Object. Sketch the Join Object in reference to the Base Objection’s dimensions so any changes will be propagated. Finally, pad the Join Object.

Now Draw the Join Object, remember to use the create external geometry, and pad it.

3. You’ll now want to switch to the Part Workbench (NOT THE PART DESIGN WORKBENCH). Make sure no body is active (no part is bolded), click on the Join Object’s Sketch and click the 2D offset tool. This will create a new Object (Offset Object) and let you set an offset value. You can also change whether the offset is rounded or not here (If you care).

4. Now select the final padded item from the Base Object, and hit the clone button which will create our Final Base Object. Then, with this Final Base Object active, click the Offset Object and make a sub-object. You should now have the original Base Object and a sketch slightly larger than the Join Object. Make a pocked using this sketch and you should now have a cut out of the Base Object with some tolerance for the Join Part.

5. If you need to adjust the size, simply go back into the original Offset Object and adjust the offset value.

Final product (ish)

Well this is what it looks like.

I have no idea if it’ll work when printed, but that’s it for now. Until next time (unless I hang myself first). With my little tutorial bit out of the way, here is my final box. If I could do it with pencil hands, you can do it with pen hands.

Learning Resources

Thanks to the following post which taught me how to do the above.

Forum Post which helped me find this solution

Website Update

I’ll be trying to tackle the look of the blog post list. I’ve sketched out a few designs, but I’m not sure which I like (or hate). I might need to use some design tool to mock it up, and also consider what it might look like on mobile.