3D Printed Pour-spout Forms a Rounded Lip

First date with OnShape went great!

This 3D-printed PLA pour spout potentially increases the utility of this one-piece plaster mold. As can be seen on the upper section analysis, the spout is designed to form the lip of this small Medalta Potteries bowl (and provide a guide for cutting its inside edge). It has lugs that extend outward to enable holding it down using rubber bands. I intend that it will be cleanly removable after the piece begins to pull away from the mold, leaving a high-quality lip that only needs a little trimming. This spout also permits precise monitoring of when to pour out the slip and it prevents most of the mess made using traditional molds having a spare.

This is the first piece I have made wholly using OnShape CAD. Experience with Fusion 360 gives me expectations of how this should work and those expectations are generally being met. Cost is no longer an obstacle to adopting professional 3D CAD for mold making. I am using OnShape on my 2014 Mac Mini running Ubuntu Linux (on 16gb RAM). And Prusa Slicer, OctoPrint, GIMP, Kdenlive, InkScape and productivity software are all running smoothly on it.

Related Pictures

OnShape CAD is Free for Hobby Makers:

Is it as good as Fusion 360?

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

It is very hard to let Fusion 360 CAD go. But the approaching $750 renewal is powerful motivation! OnShape is amazing. There is nothing to install, it runs in a browser tab like Google docs (see picture below). Sure, it won’t run offline, but I am almost never offline. It functions very similar to Fusion 360 for my basic requirements of making molds for slip casting. Recent experience with the complexity and slowness of Solidworks for Makers, which is total overkill for what I need, really makes OnShape look good.

My OnShape drawings are stored in my cloud account and are public. That sounded bad at first, but it also means that they are shareable with others (another person, whom I choose, can actually work on a drawing at the same time as me). The full OnShape is working in Firefox on my 2014 Mac Mini Ubuntu Linux machine. This is beyond exciting to me, traditional CAD has always required expensive hardware that is far beyond a hobbyist (of course, OnShape will also work in Safari on Mac and Chrome on Windows). A real bonus: I can edit drawings on iPad in what appears to be full power mode (although a mouse and keyboard are needed for serious work).

Besides the above, here are some of the features and advantages I am seeing:
-It opens and saves many professional CAD file types (a major drawback in SolidWorks for Makers).
-It is really fast, login is quick and a drawing can be open in seconds, this is way better than xDesign for Makers (from Solidworks).
-Documents are always saved, close one by simply clicking the home icon on the upper left.
-The timeline (called the "Feature Tree") can be reordered, turned back and has folders like Fusion 360.
-To 3D print a body just select it, right-click and choose to export it in 3MF or STL format, it goes into the downloads folder where it can be opened by my slicer (e.g. Prusa Slicer or Simplify 3D).
-All tools are in one long, monochrome ribbon at the top; icons look alike until you learn them. I prefer this over the large space-hogging tool icons spread across menus and workspaces in Fusion 360.
-Like Fusion 360, sketching constraints are inferred as sketches are created and applying them works in a similar fashion (although I am still looking for the equivalent of the co-linear one). Their tiny symbols display in groups and associate to the point or line by a light grey line.
-Constraints and dimensions are movable so drawings can be uncluttered for printing.
-Section analysis is in the "Camera and Render Options" popup under the view cube.
-The spline sketching and bevel tools seem to work better.
-Parameters, called variables, are more in your face, they are even shown in the timeline.
-Panning and rotating work differently and the viewcube does not rotate the object like Fusion 360. But the iPad version of OnShape beats Fusion easily in this respect.

The secret weapon of learning OnShape, if you already know Fusion 360, is an AI chatbot. Just ask any question about how to do something. Just start by creating a sketch and extruding or revolving it. One helpful migration approach is to print the sketch(es) of a Fusion 360 drawing (with constraints and dimensions) and work from that to create the equivalent in OnShape. Rationalize as you do it and you will end up with a simpler timeline and thus a better design.

Videos

Media

Drawing the Same Mold Using Fusion 360 and OnShape CAD
I will make a classic Medalta beer bottle case-mold for 3D printing (just pour in plaster and you have a mold to slip cast bottles). I will highlight the differences between it and Fusion 360 as we go.

Links

URLs

https://www.onshape.com
OnShape parametric cloud-native CAD software
This is looking like my new favorite 3D CAD package. It is free for hobby makers, runs in a browser so it works on almost any computer. And it works on iPad. If you have Fusion 360 experience you will hit the ground running, most of the tools and functionality needed for mold making are very similar.

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