Design for 3D-Printing

Day 3 11:00 Ground en Hardware

Dec. 29, 2025 11:00-11:40

3D-Printers have given us all the unprecedented ability to manufacture mechanical parts with a very low barrier to entry. The only thing between your idea and its physical manifestation is the process of designing the parts. However, this is actually a topic of incredible depth: Design engineering is a whole discipline to itself, built on top of tons and tons of heuristics to produce shapes that are functional, strong, and importantly: well-manufacturable In this talk, I will present the rules for designing well-printable parts and touch on other areas of design considerations so you can learn to create parts that work first try and can be reproduced by others on their 3d-printers easily.

Over the years, the 3d-printing community has discovered many tricks and rules that help creating parts that can be printed well and fulfill their purpose as best as possible. I started collecting these rules and wrote an article guide to make this knowledge more accessible. I want to present the most important principles and the mindset that is needed to achieve perfected design.

This is not about how to use a CAD program to design a part — but rather about the thought process of the design engineer while drawing up a part. A though process that consists of compromises between many objectives, of heuristic rules, and many neat little tricks.

The article that this talk is based on can be found on my blog: https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/

Speakers of this event

rahix

Originally from embedded systems software, I pivoted to mechanical and electrical engineering to satiate my curiosity about the whole world of designing technical systems.