Knobs

I was visiting with a friend a few days ago and he asked about printing knobs (like you’d use on car dashboard, appliance, radio, etc.). I hadn’t thought about that before but said, sure!

I quickly drew something up in Fusion 360 and it looked pretty good. Unfortunately I didn’t keep the drawing to share here, but I did make a couple of basic knobs this afternoon just to see how they printed.

The first one was just a basic knob like you’d find on something with, well knobs. I put the flat side on it on so where it slides on the metal post it would let it “catch” and turn the device like it is supposed to. The sides were smooth and I hit them with some light sanding thinking it would show up better in the pic (turns out that really wasn’t much improvement).

Here’s the first one I printed (took about 20 minutes):

This was fine and would work (had I made to spec for something real), but the smooth texture on the outside was something I wanted to see if I could get to have a bit more “grip”, so I went back to Fusion 360 after watching a couple of Youtube videos and added some rounded ridges.

I was really surprised how well they came out. The print needs a little sanding to refine it, but that’s easy enough. The following picture shows the GCode viewer from OctoPrint while it was printing.

And this is the final product.

Now I just need to find a real-world application where I can make something useful (beyond just improving my maker skills).