Ok I managed to break my dial gauge… and my finger. I haven’t broken my finger. I just cut myself but my girlfriend gave me this weird plaster that you’re meant to put on ladies feets. And it looks like a really thick callus. Anyway I broke this. It fell of the, or more to the point the arm with it’s heavy base, fell of the table and that snapped. I probably could glue this with some liquid weld but I want to try make a version of this which isn’t hollow, and something that I can 3D print quite quickly. In a way I was quite lucky with how it broke as it only broke into three sections. But also the most cheaply made part which would be easier to replace. Maybe this was engineered this way – a week point?

I’m less likely to loose these if they’re stuck to a larger magnet. Wonderful mechanism in there (ROLF).

In any case I’m now going to model the replacement piece in Fusion 360. The most important tool to do this is my vernier caliper and patience… lots of patience.

Ok lets do this. I’m sure something will go wrong. So I’m going to make a new sketch and in the sketch I’m going to create a circle. And this is going to be the outer diameter of the inside lip on the dial gauge which I’m measuring now. It’s about 51.6mm.

I’m going to measure the hole. That’s 2.3mm for the machine screws. That is 1.66 from the edge. 22.99 from the centre. What I’ll do is… is rotate that around the centre but firstly I’m checking for any undue complexity in the design, such as an offset hole which makes it harder to remake the part.

That’s about 38.5mm. Yep I’ll go to sketch, circular pattern, select centre, 3, ok. And this is 2.1mm oh wait. I’ve just noticed something else. It’s hard to show but there is little countersunk hole on this as well, so I’ll have to add that in as well. That is 3.7mm.

I’ll extrude that first. New component and 2.1mm. So I’m going to put another sketch on top of this, 3.7mm, circular pattern, centre point, three… and I’ll extrude that -1.64. I later changed that to extrude -1.45 mm.

I’m going to make a new sketch now on the surface again, and I’m going to make a rectangle that’s going to be 5.1mm by 17.8mm (in the centre). Ok that’s going to be 18.7 high.

The circle in there is 6.6mm. Start a new sketch on this face here, and I’ll make a circle 6.6mm. and it is… that is going to be 10.3 (from the bottom). I’ll make another circle and you can see that shape on the mouse, erm it means it’s a tangent from the circle. (I trimmed the extra lines and extruded the parts I wanted to remove) -5.1mm.

I’m now going to use the fillet tool to bulk up the bracket, and make it stronger. (I add a radius of 3mm to all four corners of the bracket.) I then create a chamfer on the bell like curves on either side of the bracket, and around the circle base.

So that is the new back. All I’ve got to do now is component… if this was more complicated I would have labelled all this. And save this as an STL file. I then imported the STL file into repeire host and sliced it using my secret settings before printing. I compared the times of a 20% infill and a 100% and decided to go for strength instead of a lighter weight and speedier print.

I also had time to pop over to the community section of YouTube and finally block the words woodprix… I’ll never have to flag that crap as spam even again I hope.

While it was printing I tried to fix the broken pieces of the original back using some liquid solvent cement.

You can barely see the crack line. You literally just brush this stuff on the crack and it seeps in using capillary action. You want to make sure you have loads of glue on the brush as if there’s not enough it’ll only go so far into the crack and you’ll only get a week join along the surface.

Ok I think I’m going to have to reprint this as the rebate hasn’t really formed properly.

I ended up printing a second version with slight modifications to the depth of the machine screw recesses. I’m really happy with how this came out. It didn’t take too much time out of my schedule and once you learn how to use a 3D printer it feels like an achievement.

Anyway that’s another one from me. If you want to know more about 3D printers I have a playlist on my second channel where I assemble and try make sense of their designs and how to use them. And for the rest of you, I’m working on a drill press restoration video which I why I needed to fix my dial gauge so hopefully that’ll be up soon.

Thanks again for watching, don’t forget to sacrifice a thumb, and let me know what you thought in the comments section bellow providing it doesn’t provide the words wood-pricks.