 How about a quick and fun print-in-place hinge design? Here's a phone stand model that prints in just 19 minutes and will allow me to demonstrate a design technique for successful print-in-place hinges. Now, print-in-place means no assembly required. The model prints in one piece and after popping it from the build plate, it will have a working hinge. These are a lot of fun to make and opens up a world of creativity. All right, let's jump right in. First of all, I want to send a shout out to all my Patreon supporters really appreciate you all supporting my channel. It means a lot. It allows me to set the time to create these videos for you. And if you are not a supporter of this channel and you would like to be, I've got all the links and information below. So besides helping me create videos like this, you also get some bonus content in the form of additional videos and all my Fusion 360 files for the models I create, including this one. Also, you'll see me using a bunch of sketch constraints in this tutorial. Mastering the sketch constraints available to you are an essential part of learning Fusion 360 and allowing you to be a more efficient designer and also being able to create designs that don't break when you come back and make changes. I'm going ahead and put together a sketch constraints cheat sheet for you. It's a free download and the link for that is below as well. We're going to begin by creating a sketch on the XY plane. And I'm going to come in with a two-point rectangle right under the create menu. I'm going to start at the origin and I'm going to make this 50 millimeters in height by three and a half millimeters in width. There we have it. Let me zoom in. And now we're going to add the slits that we need to be able to revolve this and make a working hinge. So the approach I'm going to take here is I'm going to just draw a couple lines here. I'm going to come over here just sort of in this bottom half here. I'm going to go in straight about a millimeter and then at an angle and across. And so this is going to be the profile we're going to use. Just a shout out actually to one of my students Ed who came up with this little part right here in my class because I'll show you what I was doing before. I was doing this which worked. The problem is I'm going to come in with an offset. There's actually a couple problems. If I offset this notice if I go down this line doesn't extend to the edge here and if I go up it goes over. So then you have to extend it or come in and trim it which then removes constraints and it's just a little hassle. And then it presents another issue later on in the design. So what I came up with was adding this little slit here because now look what happens if I offset or I should say add a little horizontal line here because now you can move this up and down and it meets on the edge here. It'll make a little more sense later why I'm doing this but for now I'm going to do that offset hit enter. And let's go ahead and set this dimension here at 0.5 millimeters. There we have it. And now we'll do a few more dimensions. I'll dimension this top line to be 1 millimeter and I'll also dimension this line here at 1 millimeter. And then I'm going to put an angle here of 135 and this angle here is between this horizontal line and the angled line here. All right and then doing all that you'll see now that they're related. So if I move one the other one will follow up and down. I'm going to take the top line here and I'm going to dimension let's do this line from my origin. So let me go back down click there and let's make that 17 millimeters. Okay now we'll simply mirror this to the top. So to do that we'll create a mirror line. So let's find that center line by snapping to that triangle there right in the middle. Put a line across let's make it a construction line and then we'll come in and grab a mirror here under our great menu. Double click this chain and this chain here and then we're going to choose our mirror line here. Click on select let me zoom out so we can see it. Click here and we see that we have it mirrored right there. All right and now we're simply going to select these three profiles and create a revolve. So let me finish the sketch go to create down to revolve right here. Select each of these three profiles and in my axis of rotation it's going to be this left line here and there we have it. Got my revolve and just to see what's going on let's do a quick section analysis here and now section analysis right in the center. That center plane there and you can see here that we have this gap here sort of a little cone feature that will allow this to spin and give us the clearance we need. All right I'll click okay there let's untangle the analysis and we'll continue the design. For our next sketch notice our if I bring in our origin plane let's go to a home view here that it cuts the center of our cylinder there and I want my next plane to be at the bottom here. Now I know I made this circle to be 3.5 millimeters in radius which gives me a 7 millimeter diameter. So what I'm going to do is create an offset plane. So I'll go to construct offset plane select that xy plane and I'm going to go down negative 3.5 millimeters and that's going to put that plane right down here and so with that basically it's tangent to that bottom surface and then I'm going to create a sketch right on that plane I just made. Let's untangle the body's visibility here and I don't need to see these sketches so let me remove the sketch and I'll create a rough outline of the shape I want to make and then come in later and add some dimensions. So let me start let's let me start with the line down here and go up I'm going to go up 50 millimeters and let's see I can snap to these grids here because I've got my grid settings here snapped to grid and you can see my grids are I have them at five millimeters and this is because if you click here and you go to grid settings I've got that set to fixed and major grid spacing at five so you can change the size of those grids. All right so let's continue let me untangle that origin I'm going to grab another line here I'm also going to go over another 50 millimeters here go up 15 and then go over about 10 down a bit about three maybe go in two and then maybe down a little bit I'm not being completely accurate here I'm just going to go roughly what I need and then I'm going to come in and add dimensions so next I'm going to go and add an angle and come up right here and then snap back to the center there okay so you can see Fusion put in a bunch of constraints here with these perpendicular constraints so the really important thing is some of these lines I want straight if they're not straight then go ahead and add constraints here a horizontal constraint to make them straight okay so next I'm going to put in my dimensions so I'll start with this vertical line I'm going to make that 50 millimeters you can see even though I made the line 50 millimeters by snapping to the grid Fusion doesn't consider that as you know actual dimension so it doesn't throw them in unless you come in and actually add them here making the bottom 50 the right here I'm going to go with 15 you can see things got thrown off a little bit so let me just grab this and bring it back down all right 10 millimeters you can sometimes mess up the shape of your profile when you start entering dimensions but it's easy to fix by just moving the parts that aren't constrained yet all right we'll continue I'm going to make this vertical line here three millimeters and then let me take this down a bit this part here I'm going to go with two and then I'm going to enter five for this vertical line and then this horizontal line we're going to go with 15 all right now I'm going to enter the angle between these two lines so that horizontal and angle nine I'm going to make that 110 millimeters this is the beauty of this you can make it whatever angle you want you know depending how you want if you're using this as a phone stand how you know the angle you want it to sit okay now I can see that this is fully constrained because all the lines are black now and not blue and so before I extrude this there's one other thing I need to do and I'm going to bring in my bodies here and I'm going to project this point right here so p for project I'm going to project that point click okay on toggle bodies now and with that point I'm going to take a line I'm just going to draw a straight line going up and down just making sure I get a constraint here telling me that it's vertical and then I'm going to grab my coincident constraint and click on the line and in this point now go straight through it you'll see me use a lot of constraints here and this is it's really great you know to know what these constraints do because it's really going to speed up your design flow when you create your own models and I do have a constraints cheat sheet it's free I have the link down below you can click on it and basically it's a sheet you print out or you can just save it to your computer and it shows you exactly what each of these constraints do with like an image in the description how they recommend you check that out and get to learn these constraints because it's really going to speed up your workflow and allow you to make better designs that can later be changed without breaking all right so now that I have that set I'll click on finish sketch and now we're going to take just this profile here on the right and we're going to extrude that up but let's bring in our body's visibility and basically I want this to attach to just this bottom hinge and the top and I don't need to see the middle one so let me untangle the visibility if we're extrude I'm going to select just this profile without this section here on the left and I'm going to go up three millimeters and then click okay all right now that I have that I want to now attach this extrusion that I just made to this cylinder so let me untangle sketches here and you'll see me untangle sketches sometimes when I'm doing extrusions it just makes it easier sometimes to make the selections you need because with the sketches in view it can be easy to select the wrong profile you're looking for and sometimes it prevents you from selecting the body surfaces that you actually want to extrude so let me untangle those and then I'm going to hit E for extrude I'm going to select this left face here and I want that to extrude to this cylinder so what I'm going to do is change the extent type from distance to object and I can simply select the cylinder here and notice what happened there let me click okay operation is joined and now that extrusion follows this shape of that cylinder so you can see how it curves in and I have now only two bodies and it follows that shape notice though that if I print this like this that this that surface would then weld to this middle hinge here which I don't want and so I need to put a little clearance spacing in there so to do that what I'm going to do is go to modify down to press pull select just that surface and I'm going to do a negative 0.5 millimeters it's going to take that surface and pull it back leaving me with a gap in here so now if I show the cylinder you can see I have the little gap in there that allow it to turn it'd be easier to see with a section analysis here so let's turn that on and you can see that gap there so this is really the key here to get these print in place prints to work okay so now that I have that let me close that section analysis there we're basically going to do the same thing to the opposite side instead of creating a new sketch let's go back to the last sketch we did on the timeline and go to edit and let's untaggle our body's visibility and we'll simply create a mirror here so create down to mirror and then we'll double click this line here to select the entire chain hold shift and click the left edge to deselect that one because we want that to be our mirror line and we're also going to select this line here that we made so 10 objects total for selection and now we're going to click on mirror line and we'll select the center line to create the mirror click okay and you can see we've got the same thing mirrored there this line here is just a dimension line you can see it's thinner than the other line so sometimes it can be easy to confuse this with an actual line you can always move those out the way if you find they're getting in the way okay now that we have this section we're going to just kind of rinse and repeat finish sketch let's bring the sketch back into view we'll untaggle the visibility here of our last body leaving just that center hinge there E for extrude select that surface and let's go up three millimeters click okay we'll untaggle sketch visibility and then E for extrude again we're going to select this left face there and distance we're going to change that from or extent to type we're going to change that from distance to two objects our object is going to be the cylinder get that same curve there operation is joined click okay and now we'll have to again apply that offset there that press pull so it doesn't weld to our existing hinges so let's go to modify press pull select both of these surfaces here negative 0.5 millimeter press pull there there we have it and that's basically it right there let me do a section analysis here and you can see that we've got this hinge here you know showing the gap right in between there on the right here and then on the left here and this prints beautifully so last thing we'll do here is I'll just add some fillets so F for fillet and I'm going to fill it each of these edges here and so I'll just go ahead and select them beautiful thing with the fillet tools you can select right through the part it's smart enough to know exactly what you want to select it knows to select the edges so I'm just going to click on all these whoops if you select the wrong face clicking again to deselect it I should have a total of 16 edges I'm going to do a 1 millimeter fillet there just to round all those out and there we go there's our print in place hinge go ahead and try out the model and give it a shot printing it and see how it works for you and let me know in the comments below if you have success with this or if you get stuck let me know where if it's not printing right or if it's not really folding for you but one thing you can experiment here is with the clearance there for the hinge so for example you can come into this first sketch and I made this 0.5 millimeter clearance as I did here you know in the gap between these profiles and also it's the same clearance I apply when I did the offset on these let me bring here on the a press pull tool when I pulled these in I went with a 0.5 millimeter clearance I did experiment with my printer I could actually get away with 0.2 millimeter clearance but you know you may not have that same success depending on the printer you have 0.5 should definitely work but then you can try going down like 0.4, 0.3, 0.2 because you definitely get a much tighter fit where it doesn't wobble as much and it'll be you know and it'll still work some of that has to do also with the thickness of that first layer so even though the rest might be fine if your first layer is really squishing down on your printer and it may cause the bottom layer to fuse but the rest could be fine I actually found that with one of my printers I had to kind of come in and just use a box cutter here an X-Acto knife to just cut a little slit on the bottom and then the rest of it folded fine so yeah it'll all depend on the the printer but 0.5 is a good safe bet to start with and then you can try to bring that down more and more I also wanted to include how I took advantage of some slicer settings to get this to print with the infill pattern here showing so you can see here I've got the gyro infill and I wanted to show you exactly the settings I used in Prusa Slicer to get this done which really can be applied to any slicer but I think I'm going to save that for a separate video because this video is getting a bit long so stay tuned for that one all right if you have any questions on any of the steps I took in this tutorial leave them down below in the comments