There are a lot of useful things you can do and make with just a little knowledge of 3D design. On of my favorites has been making drink coasters. Before we get started, I wanted to emphasize there is a lot of information out there about the hazards of printing materials and food safety. There are PLAs that are FDA approved. As we are making drink coasters which will not touch your food or your mouth, we won’t be going into that in this post.
Designing your coaster
- Sketch 2 circles
In Fusion 360 I want you to make 2 concentric circles like below. You will use the sketch function and select the top plane. The inner circle will have a diameter of 83.82 mm and the outer diameter will be 101.60 mm.
2. Extrude both circles
Using the extrude function, you’ll extrude the inner circle 3 mm and the outer circle 5mm.
3. Create a design and convert it to an SVG file
The tutorial below will show you how to take any image and convert it to an SVG file, to then add to your model using Inkscape (which is free). The tutorial starts with thinkercad you can ignore that part and jump to the fusion 360 tutorial.
Once you’ve either selected an image online or created your own design, we’re going to place that on the center circle. From there you’ll size it to fit in the circle to your liking.
4. Extrude the image
Select all of the image, and use the extrude tool to extrude the image by 1 mm.
5. Export to an .STL file
You’re all done designing your first coaster. From here you can export to an STL file, slice it in Cura and print.