How Much Clearance Does a Printed Thread Need?
A printed thread comes out tight, and how tight depends on which way up it was printed. Why pitch limits printability, and the coupon that settles it.
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Articles
Designing a Cam and Follower That Prints
A cam turns rotation into motion you draw. Motion laws, the 30° pressure-angle limit, and a grooved cam and follower that prints without supports.
Designing a Geneva Drive That Prints
A crank that never stops, a wheel that moves in locked steps: the geometry behind a Geneva drive, its 2.4× speed peak, and a model that prints without supports.
Coming from Onshape or SolidWorks to Rig Cad
A feature map from Onshape and SolidWorks to Rig Cad: sketches, patterns, shells, threads, variables and mates, what has no equivalent, and the mental shift.
Threads and Snap Fits That Print
Thread node, calibrated clearance, helix phase proven by interference check, printable pitch rules, and a mating snap-fit pair with strain and force readouts.
Pattern 3D: Lattices, Infill, and Surface Textures
The Pattern 3D node and its 150+ families, bounding a lattice with an Intersection, scale and precision trade-offs, and the Infill and Surface Pattern steps.
Expressions and Variables in Rig Cad
The expression language behind every parametric Rig Cad project: grammar, functions, degrees vs radians, text, variable types, readouts, validators, handles.
Fillets and Chamfers Without a Fillet Tool
Five ways to round or bevel an edge in Rig Cad: primitive corner radius, extrude edge profiles, SDF blends, Minkowski sums and Surface Offset, measured.
Why Is My Model Slow? Precision, Bounds, Engines
A diagnostic path for slow Rig Cad projects: find the node, match the symptom, learn the cube law behind SDF precision, and pick engine and GPU settings.
Geometry Nodes, Displacement, and the Implicit Tree
If you already think in Geometry Nodes, the Objects tree is the graph. Mesh Boolean is a hard CSG node. The purple diamond turns that same node into a field.
Versioned Production: Presets, Reorders, and Change Control
Record project revisions, production profiles, generated files, and inspection results so customized 3D-printed orders remain reproducible.
Fits, Clearances, and Tolerances for Customized 3D Prints
Turn measured printer behavior into dependable sliding, push, press, and cavity fits across customized 3D-printed product families.
Beyond Sliders: Safe Parameter Spaces for Printable Products
Sliders define choices; reliable products need relationships between them. Derive dimensions, constrain combinations, handle failures, and test the family.
Text as Geometry: Building Reliable Personalized Products
From font glyphs and measured bounds to printable strokes, attachment rules, and production tests: reliable personalized goods treat text as geometry.
Mesh Cleanup in Rig Cad: Repair, Remesh, Simplify
Choose the right Rig Cad mesh-cleanup step, repair topology defects, rebuild triangle distribution, and cut triangle count without losing required geometry.
Post-Processing in Rig Cad: The Ordered Stack
How Rig Cad's ordered post-processing stack modifies solved geometry: Mirror, Cut Plane, Surface Offset, Shell, and the field-only Infill and Surface Pattern.
Oversize the Cutter: Reliable Booleans in Rig Cad
Use deliberate cutter margins to prevent coincident-face failures, preserve transformed through-cuts, and give smooth SDF subtraction room to resolve cleanly.
Transforms and Reference Frames in Rig Cad
Learn how position, rotation, and scale compose through local, parent, and world reference frames so Rig Cad features remain aligned, movable, and parametric.
Pricing Customized 3D Prints: Costs, Yield, and Margin
Build repeatable prices for customized 3D prints from material, machine time, labor, yield, selling fees, and margin.
Gyroid TPMS: When Geometry Becomes Structure
From butterfly-wing photonic crystals to compact heat exchangers, the gyroid shows how triply periodic minimal surfaces become tunable engineering structures.