Shaun C. Bryant

Tinkercad is a superb cloud-based 3D design platform, which enables you to design 3D prototypes and those 3D “wow” projects that you want to show off to your friends and colleagues (and your mum and dad). Tinkercad For Dummies gives you a great grounding in how to use Tinkercad, but what about all those little shortcuts and tips and tricks that will take you from being a Tinkercad Jedi padawan to a Tinkercad Jedi master?

It is often really tough to decide on what materials to use when 3D printing. A lot of this information, including a number of figures, actually comes from the Tinkercad blog page. It is a useful guide when you consider 3D printing your Tinkercad designs. You should consider numerous factors, including the Type of material Minimum thickness of the printed material Texture of the printed material Cost of the material (probably the most important) The cost also depends on whether the 3D print will be a prototype for a design, a gift, or even a product to sell.

Nylon (polyamide) comes in a raw powder format that is normally white, but it can be dyed, sprayed, or smoothed to pretty much any 3D print of any 3D design. It is also known as white plastic, durable plastic, or strong plastic.When 3D printing, the laser in the 3D printer melts the nylon powder in layers that are microns thick at exactly 170°C (338°F), thus giving you incredible flexibility in your 3D printing of your design due to this incredible accuracy.

ABS stands for Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene and is often used in home-based 3D printing. ABS is classified as a thermoplastic, which means the ABS softens to be molded when heated and hardens when cooled. ABS has been widely used in many industries because of its ability to take on many forms and maintain high quality in those forms.

Instead of using powder or filament, STL files use a liquid resin to produce 3D prints. It is a liquid material, so more often than not, you will need to provide a support structure for overhanging parts and cavities.A resin 3D print is created in a tank filled with liquid resin. The 3D printing process starts with a layer of UV-sensitive liquid polymer being spread over a platform.

3D printing in stainless steel (type 316L) combines excellent surface quality 3D prints with great resolution and a significant level of detail. Stainless steel is not as strong as titanium, but it does allow for better detail and thinner walls at a much lower price.As with nylon (polyamide), the 3D printing technology prints a stainless steel model by binding together layers of ultra-fine grains of stainless steel powder in an inkjet-like printer.

Paintable resin provides all of the qualities of resin, but it has a rougher surface that provides a key for paint and color. To paint on a 3D model effectively, you need a key, which is a slightly rougher surface that allows the paint to adhere to that surface.The maker and hobbyist communities love paintable resin because they can 3D print a design and then apply colored paints to give the 3d print realism and make it look real world.

As with gold, wax 3D printing and lost-wax casting are used to build your design when using silver. The wax printing process uses STL files with the same wax-like resin with support structures that are printed along with the model to make sure the 3D model doesn’t fall apart. These support structures are automatically generated and manually removed after the printing process.

Gold is rarely 3D printed directly. Most often, gold is printed using a wax 3D print with lost wax casting process. This process uses STL files with a wax-like resin. Support structures are printed along with the model (which is often quite delicate) to ensure that the model does not fall apart during the process.