Let's make a 3D printable ruler together!

Hello, i'm William!

Ive put together what i hope is a follow-able guide on how to make a ruler in fusion 360

there should also be an onshape guide releasing

Good luck and have fun!

This will take ~2 hours.

Prize: Your ruler printed and mailed to you + 2 snowflakes

---

Note for CAD nerds:

I know there will people saying [insert-cad-here] is better and whatnot, however fusion is what im most comfortable with, if you’re more familiar with other CAD software you’re more than welcome to use that. I’m not saying fusion is the perfect or the best, because its neither. But even if you do know other CAD, why not try something new, try fusion :3

1). an introduction

A quick pic of what we are trying to make

this is just a plain ruler, most rullers will start off looking something like that, however i encourage and expect that you will customise them to your hearts content to make your ruler uniquely yours :3

Fusion 360 UI

hopefully your fusion360 looks something like this all the tools we will be using to draw sketches and turn those sketches into 3D things should all be at the top of the screen

my favourite key bind s - search

if you ever get stuck because i say something and you just can’t find it, this key bind is a life saver.

it’s also cool because if you’re looking for a feature in fusion you can just type in the name and see if it exists

Key binds for moving around your model:

pan - hold middle mouse button zoom - scroll mouse wheel orbit - hold shift + middle click + mouse button

IMPORTANT NOTE: unlike onshape, fusion does not auto save, make sure you regularly save to avoid accidents

and like almost all software save - ctrl+S

2). beginnings of the ruler

now for making the ruler the max size of ruler we can print for you is:

200mm long, 70mm wide, 4mm tall

(i made it big so you don’t skip past it) so please keep your maximum dimensions below that

We want to start by drawing out an overhead outline of out ruler

then we need to select a plane to start drawing on you can click any of the orange squares and it will work

your screen should look something like this

now we can use the 2-point rectangle tool to draw a rectangle that will define how big our ruler is!

with the 2-point rectangle tool:

• you click on the canvas to start or stop drawing
• you can type in numbers to set the size
  • you press tab to switch between them

your ruler should look something like this

now we can press finish sketch to finish the sketch

next we want to make the 2d drawing into the start of our 3d ruler to do this we use the extrude tool you can either click the icon

or use the shortcut - e

because we only have one sketch it has probably auto selected it but if not

in the extrude pop up, click on profiles and then click the filled in bit of the ruler we just drew

now we can extrude it the distance we want by setting the distance number in the extrude tab I’m going to make my ruler 3mm thick

so, you should be here

and you can press ok now

well done! you’ve made the start for our ruler

3). adding the gradations

don’t be scared by the word gradations, it’s not some fancy fusion thing, it’s just the name for the marks on a ruler.

to do this we are going to draw and make one mark and then use the "rectangular pattern" tool to copy it across the ruler without drawing it a bunch

how big to make the gradations?

gradations smaller than 1mm probably won’t print due to the 0.4mm nozzles that are common on 3d printers

the back ruler has 5mm spacings the closer one has 1mm spacings personally, i think the 5mm ones are clearer to read

a closer up pic of the 1mm gradation ruler

for my ruler I want short marks every 5mm and big marks every 10mm

so let’s start on the smaller ones

we want to start by making 1 mark in the ruler

to do that we now draw a sketch of what the marks look like so we click the new sketch button and click the top of our ruler where we want the mark

my prefered method for doing it goes something like this drawing a line how far apart the marks should be from the edge so, for me 5mm

i want my markings to be 5mm long, and 0.4mm wide i also want them to be centred on the point we just marked

so, we can draw a two 0.2mm x 5mm rectangle on either side

next we finish the sketch and then extrude into the ruler to make the marking! :yay:

like this!

now we are going to use a pattern to make the pattern continue down the ruler!

we are trying to pattern the cut we made, which is a feature so we need to change from bodies to feature

now we need to select the feature to do this we can either

try hover over the indent and hope it works or we can click the extrude feature we made in the timeline (I prefer this method)

next we next to pick the "axis" this is just the direction that fusion makes the pattern in we can just pick the long edge of the ruler

now we also want to change the mode from extent to spacing and set the distance to how often we want the markings i want them to be 5mm apart so i put 5mm in

now we can see a preview

we just need to increase the quantity,

boop now we have the markings :yay:

---

we can repeat that process for centimetre markings

if you did simple rectangle marking like I did you could just extrude every other one deeper

the other way would be repeating the process for the first markings, but you make them bigger / a different shape, and set the spacing to

4). adding the numbers (optional)

time to add numbers! if you want numbers that is. you don’t need to add numbers, if you want the extra space for customising it the way you want feel free to leave them out.

so first we are going to create a new sketch on the top of the ruler again

then we can use the line tool to draw out a box where we want our numbers to be (the number don’t need to fill up the box)

i made the lines into "construction" lines which just means that, you can snap onto them and use them to construct things. but they won’t affect which parts a filled in i think the term is "non-printing"

then we can use the pattern tool to put one above each marking where we want a text box

you could draw them out by hand but i don’t think either of us fancy drawing out 15 boxes

so, we select all the lines that we want in the pattern

we pick a direction

next we have to add the text

so now we have a box which we can click in two places to define the corners

I let it snap onto two opposite corners in the first box

and I type 1 into the window on the right

it’s also worth considering what size you make your font now because if you have double digit amount of units make sure you have space for that in the text boxes

I also picked align centre for horizontal and vertical

so, a font size like this will clearly overlap with the next letter

but a font like this should be ok

a bit of clicking later you should have something like this

---

hopefully you are at a point that looks something like this!

---

finish adding the rest of ruler

Now you should have a ruler! however, you’re not quite done yet for the next part you’re on your own

the last part of this is customising your ruler

here are some ideas:

• perhaps make it a cool shape, in the first step we made our ruler a rectangle, why not make one of the sides wavy
• different shaped gradation makes on the ruler
  • instead of the little line i used, perhaps a triangle, or whatever else you can come up with
• crazy units? Cubit, Smoots, Links, Light nanosecond etc
• add a cool pattern
  • perhaps hexagon cutouts
  • stripes on it cut into it
• perhaps you want to add some text on it with the text tool
• add graphics
  • you can import SVGs into sketches, so you could draw an Orph, convert it to an SVG, and have and Orph ruler
  • if you add art it has to be yours
  • AI "art" is strictly prohibited

and if you’re struggling to do something, give it a google search, there are plenty of amazing YouTube tutorials and forums out there with guides on how to do everything under the sun!

Example photos

example of different shaped tick pattern

neocat ruler, example of being able to add art fusion has an import SVG function that helps with this

example of some things you could do to the edge of the ruler

a cool wavy pattern in the ruler i just clicked around with "split point spline" in the sketch to make it, looking forward to the cool things you guys come up with!

Submit at https://forms.hackclub.com/haxmas-day-6